Hugh MacDonald of Sleat did not marry Coroner Gunn’s daughter. Firstly, be aware there is no mention of Hugh MacDonald of Sleat visiting Caithness in Sir Robert Gordon’s history. Now some argue that the visit by Hugh MacDonald occurred in 1460 (Mark Rugg Gunn page 49 for example). Hmm. 1460? Sir Robert Gordon clearly wrote that Coroner Gunn was in power before the time of the Earls of Caithness and 1460 was very much ‘Earl time’. The Earl of Caithness was in power before 1460 – and he was also Earl of the Orkney Islands and had to excuse himself from visiting Norway to visit his (other) King in 1460 as he had local bother with his ‘old enemy’ the Lord of the Isles, who was Hugh MacDonald of Sleat’s brother. So we are meant to believe, if one accepts Gunn mythic history, that Hugh MacDonald visited Caithness after his battle in the Orkney islands where he helped fight the forces of the Earl of Caithness and Orkney (being the head of law and order in Caithness) and then dropped in for a visit to a minor representative of law and order in Caithness (namely, the Coroner) for a party and had it off with the Coroner’s daughter? Absurd. IF the Coroner had been alive (which he wasn’t) he would have clapped Hugh MacDonald and his crew in jail as traitors or otherwise the Coroner would have been jailed by the Earl. And let’s not forget that what Hugh would have logically done after a big battle which was to go home with loot gained and return injured soldiers to their family, not go socialising. The idea that Hugh MacDonald popped down to the Coroner in 1460 is historically silly and also logically absurd. Yes, I am sure that Hugh MacDonald had a relationship with a female Gunn – incidentally the first female Gunn known – but the idea that the Gunn was the Coroner’s daughter lacks logic. I note that at least one of the histories of the Lords of the Isles (page 87 Alexander MacKenzie, ‘History of the MacDonalds and the Lords of the Isles’) has Hugh ‘married, secondly, a lady of the Clan Gunn of Caithness’. ‘Married’ is certainly questionable but note the lack of a Coroner Gunn link with the female Gunn… So, Hugh MacDonald of Sleat did not marry Coroner Gunn’s daughter; he did, though, have a relationship with an unknown female Gunn.
0 Comments
|
Archives
August 2021
Categories |