Account of the families of Birnie and Hamilton of Broomhill

2 ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILIE
because of his glittering armour, and his two sons, who .having several
tymes signalized themselves, yet one evening pressing furiously into the
thickest of the Picts, were all three, with several others, surrounded and
made prisoners. Night by this tyme putting ane end to the fight, they
had each of them one leg putt fast in a pair of stocks to prevent their
escape, till the Picts had more leisure to put them to death.
The father knowing very well what would come of them, advysed the
cutting off of each of their legs ; which done, they made a shift to return
to their own men, and, at the next battle fatal to the Picts, they were ob-
served to behaue themselves with a new cowrage, wherewith the losse of
their legs had animate them. The fortune of the Scots at length pre-
vailling, this King Kenneth, in his just revenge, laid not asyde his arms
untill he had extirpated the whole nation of the Picts ; their possessions
he divyded amongst his men, as they most deserved, and upon Birnie he
bestowed a baronie of land near Elgin in the shyre of Murray, yet bear-
ing his name, and which his posterity enjoyed for a long tyme thereafter,
and gaue them for their arms Gules, in resemblance of the late bloody
battle, a Faesse, the mark of honour betwixt the bow and arrow in full
draught, the most ancient arms then in use, and the three legs couped at
the thigh, in perpetual remembrance of their valour.
mtiuxm mmit of tm sife.
HIS estate was still in their possession, till about the
latter end of the Civil Wars, in the minority of
King James the 6, in which its proprietors, throw
their loyalty, were reduced to almost nothing, the
last whereof was the above William, whose picture
wee have. He married Margaret Fraser, a daugh-
ter of the Laird of Philorth's, now Lord Saltoun, (she was one of Queen
Mary's maids ;) dyed about the thirty-fourth year of his age, and left of
issue only one son.