Ordnance gazetteer of Scotland

INVERNESS
INVERNESS
lived in the castle, and held in it a parliament, to
which all the northern barons were summoned. Alex-
ander, Lord of the Isles, was on this occasion made
prisoner for a year; and when once more set free, re-
turned with an army at his heels to wreak vengeance on
his keepers. He got into the town, under the pretence
of friendship for it, and then immediately pillaged the
place and set it on fire; but his bold attempt to seize
the castle was successfully resisted. In 1455 John, his
successor (who was quite as turbulent as he), or more
probably Donald Balloch of Isla, acting as John's lieu-
tenant, rushed down upon the town, and, after taking
the castle by surprise, again plundered and burned the
town. In 1464 the castle was visited and temporarily
occupied by James III., and in 1499 by James IV. In
1508 the keepership of the castle was conferred hered-
itarily on the Earl of Huntly; and in 1751 we find
the Duke of Gordon claiming £300 as compensation for
the abolition of his hereditary office of constable of the
castle of Inverness. In 1555 the castle received the
Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, and was the scene of a
Convention of Estates and of extraordinary courts, sum-
moned by her to quiet the Highlands and punish caterans
and political offenders; and the Earl of Caithness was
consigned to one of its dungeons because he had har-
boured freebooters. In 1562 Queen Mary, having en-
tered the town attended by the Earl of Moray, was
refused admission to the castle, as the governor was a
retainer of the Earl of Huntly, who was in rebellion.
She was in consequence obliged to take up her residence
and hold her Court in a private house, till, her troops
having been strengthened by the accession of the
Mackintoshes, the Frasers, and the Munroes, the castle
was reduced and the governor hanged. In 1644, on
intelligence of the descent of a party of Irish on the
west coast to join the Marquis of Montrose, the castle
was put in thorough repair and fully garrisoned, and
next year it successfully held out under Hurry against
a regular siege by Montrose's troops. In 1649 Mac-
kenzie of Pluscarden, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty,
and other royalists took the castle, demolished the for-
tifications, and left the ruins to decay and desolation.
The time of the Revolution, however, saw it again
patched up and used as a stronghold for the Jacobites,
the magistrates of the burgh being warmly attached to
the cause of the dethroned dynasty. It was, however,
soon wrested from them, and again used as a royal fort.
In 1718 the government of George I. repaired it, con-
verted the ancient part into barracks for Hanoverian
troops, added a new part to serve as a governor's house,
and gave the whole structure the name of Fort George.
From engravings and from the description in Burt's
Letters from the Highlands, written in 1725, it appears
to have been an imposing battlemented structure of six
stories, with sharp-pointed roofs and corner turrets. In
1745 it was occupied successively by Sir John Cope and
the Earl of Loudon on behalf of the government; while
in 1746 it fell into the hands of Prince Charles Edward
on his return from England, and was blown up. Though
the castle was thus rendered uninhabitable and useless,
a large part of the walls long remained entire; but now
nothing is left save two bastions with part of the cur-
tain wall, on the E side of the ascent from the Castle
Wynd. The site has since been occupied by the County
Buildings and prison.
What may have been the appearance of King Brude's
munitio and domus mentioned by Adamnan it is impos-
sible to tell, but the huts of the common people, which
must have stood near at hand, would be the earliest re-
presentatives of the buildings that form the burgh of
Inverness ; and the somewhat better dwellings that
would naturally cluster round the subsequent strong-
hold on the Crown would represent the second stage of
the town's growth. Some have even regarded the stone
with a hole in its centre, which was dug up a number of
years ago to the E of the road by Kingsmills to Perth, as
the socket of the original cross, but this is highly doubt-
ful. Certain it is that even after it had ceased to be the
capital of Pictland, the place still remained of impor-
tance, and early came into prominence as one of the prin-
cipal centres of the country. Tradition even — in face
of the fact that such a thing was unknown at the time —
asserts that its erection into a royal burgh was in the
time of Malcolm Ceannmor. Though that cannot there-
fore be the case, yet it was by David I. constituted one
of the six chief places of the kingdom where the King's
Justiciar held his court. It was at the same time
made a royal burgh and the seat of a sheriff, whose
authority extended over all the N of Scotland, and was
thus one of the earliest free towns in the kingdom.
William the Lyon seems to have regarded the rising
burgh with particular favour, for he granted it four
separate charters by which persons residing beyond the
bounds of the burgh were prohibited from making 'cloths
dyed and shorn contrary to the assize of David I.,' and
the burgesseswere granted exemption from wager of battle
in civil cases, and from paying toll on their merchan-
dise anywhere within the kingdom. Three of these
charters are still in possession of the corporation, and
form the commencement of a series of ancient munici-
pal records which is fuller than that of almost any other
burgh in the kingdom. William also caused a fosse to
be du" round the town on condition that the burgesses
should erect a good palisade and agree to keep it in re-
pair. During the period previous to the invasion of
Scotland by Edward I., the Scottish Kings occasionally
visited the burgh on those frequent occasions when then-
power was called into play by incursions of the Norse
and the northern Vikings, or the necessity of quelling
the insurrections of the wild inhabitants and the tur-
bulent chiefs of the adjacent country. In 1229 a power-
ful chief named Gillespick M'Scourlane burned the town,
spoiled the Crown lands adjacent to it, and, in his effort
to assume royal authority, slew all who would not
acknowledge his authority, but was afterwards defeated,
captured, and beheaded. In 1233, according to Car-
donel, Alexander II. founded a convent at Inverness for
the Dominican Friars. Taylor, in his Edward I. in the
North of Scotland, says that this same monarch — who
was a benefactor of the burgh in various ways — settled
also a colony of Franciscans or Grey Friars, who have
given name to the modern street and the burying-ground ;
but there is some obscurity on this point, for Provost
Inglis, in a MS. dated 1795, and now in the Advo-
cates' Library, says that the monastery at Inverness
was always ' called by the inhabitants ' c The Grey
Friars," although the only one of which we have an
account in history was that founded by the Dominican
Order. ... It appears by the town's records,
that the stones of the Friars' Kirk were sold in
the year 1653 to Colonel Lilburne, commanding the
troops of the Commonwealth, for building a fort at
the river mouth, which was called Oliver's Fort. In
1372, during a quarrel between the Abbot of Ar-
broath and the Bishop of Moray, the followers of the
former burned the town of Inverness and the Domini-
can monastery, but it must soon have been restored
again, for the decision of the Bishops of Moray and
Ross in the dispute between the Wolfe of Badenoch and
his wife was read 'in the church of the Preaching Friars,
Inverness, the 2d day of the month of November in the
year of the Lord 1389.' Mention of the monastery oc-
curs from time to time in various documents down to
1559, when the prior and brethren were obliged to give
up their property to the safe keeping of the Provost
and magistrates of Inverness. What became of the
silver chalices, spoons, etc., handed over, is not known,
but the tenements, rents, etc., were speedily taken pos-
session of by their keepers; and, in 1567, a formal grant
of all the property 'which formerly pertained to the
Dominican or Preaching Friars ' was obtained from
Queen Mary, and this was further confirmed by James
VI. in 1587.
In the thirteenth century the trade of the burgh was
extensive, and was, like so much of the northern trade
in those days, mostly in the hands of Flemings. The
principal exports were wool, cloths, furs, hides, fish, and
cattle — the furs possibly including beaver skins; for,
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