Old family; or, The Setons of Scotland and America

42 AN OLD FAMILY. [a.d.
an agreement to surrender the city unless relief arrived before
a certain dav. This was in July ; but a misunderstanding hav-
ing arisen, King Edward, who conducted the siege in person,
put both the governor's sons to death in a public manner and
in a conspicuous place, hoping to influence the governor to
save his children by agreeing to the English terms of surren-
der. Sir Alexander was unmoved by any such appeal, and
Scotch poets and historians have invested this episode with a
tragic interest. His wife was Christian Chevne of Straloch.
She belonged to a Norman-Scotch family, longed settled in
Aberdeenshire, and which had come into England at the Con-
quest, in the person of Ralph de Caineto, one of whose de-
scendants was created Baron Cheyne, in the English peerage,
in 1487, and another Viscount of Newhaven, in the Scottish
peerage, in 1681. The Cheynes, singular as it may appear
now that thev are so utterly forgotten, were once a very emi-
nent family. They were heritable SherifFs of Banff". Sir
Reginald Cheyne of Inverugie founded the Carmelite Monas-
tery in Aberdeen, bestowing large revenues on it. By his
wife, a daughter of Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, he had two
sons: Sir Reginald Chevne, Lord Chamberlain of Scotland in
1267, and Henry Cheyne, Bishop of Aberdeen, who sided
with his uncle's party, and was obliged to take refuge in Eng-
land. The chief seat of the family was Inverugie Castle,
now in ruins, but remarkable as containing the oldest icehouse
in Scotland. Straloch was an estate of the Cheynes in what is
now New Machar Parish, district of Buchan, Aberdeenshire.
The last mention that I can find of this ancient and once
powerful family is in Bellesheim's History of the Catholic
Church of Scotland, III., 388, who writes that: " As earlv as
1576 Dr. James Cheyne, formerly parish priest of Abovne,
and afterward canon of Tournai and professor of theology at
Douai, founded at Tournai a small seminary for his country-
men." He was of good stock and brother to the Laird of