Four lines, 2000 BC to 1600

The single most consequential event in the ancestry of everyone in this document. The Bell Beaker package — the inverted-bell drinking vessel, copper daggers, archery gear, and single crouched burials in place of communal Neolithic tombs — reached Britain around 2450 BC, and it came with people. Y-haplogroup R1b is completely absent in Neolithic British individuals sampled so far, and makes up more than 90% of Y chromosomes in Copper and Bronze Age Britain.2 Whatever these paternal lines were doing before 2450 BC, they were not doing it in Britain.

Three Early Bronze Age men from Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, dated 2026–1534 cal BC, are the closest thing to a photograph of the ancestral population at exactly this date. All three carried R1b of the L21 family that dominates modern Irish and Scottish paternal lines; the group carries about 32% steppe ancestry; blue-eye haplotypes, lactase persistence and the C282Y haemochromatosis allele were already present; and their closest modern affinity is with Irish, Scottish and Welsh populations.3 The central attributes of the insular Atlantic genome were in place four thousand years ago.

At that date the Lochbuie stone circle — nine granite slabs about 12.3 m across, a few hundred metres from where Moy Castle would stand three and a half thousand years later — was already several centuries old.26 It had been built by the population the Beaker migrants replaced. The ground the Maclaines and McFadyens would argue over in 1360 had already been ceremonial ground for longer than the argument would last.

Argyll and the Irish Sea worked as a single maritime network through the Bronze Age: Kerry copper, Irish gold, and Atlantic seaways that made the west coast a highway rather than a periphery. Kilmartin Glen, at the heart of what became the McFadyen and Maclaine world, is one of the densest prehistoric landscapes in mainland Scotland.26 Then, between 1000 and 875 BC, a large migration raised Early European Farmer ancestry in southern Britain through people genetically closest to Iron Age France, contributing about half the ancestry of Iron Age England and Wales.4 Scotland was not part of it. These four lines therefore run back to the Beaker horizon with fewer interruptions than an English line does.

Three models compete: a Late Bronze Age spread from Central Europe; a Late Neolithic spread along the Atlantic seaboard with the Beakers; or a Bronze Age spread from France, Iberia or northern Italy. The Rathlin team noted that the Beaker turnover "invites the possibility" of an accompanying early Celtic arrival.3 A 2025 study of Urnfield-related ancestry concluded instead for the Central European model, with the expansion reaching Britain around 800 BC.5 Two serious readings, sixteen hundred years apart. And the same 2025 team state plainly that further intrusions into Ireland cannot be evaluated at all, because there are no Irish genomes between about 3500 and 1200 years before present — a 2,300-year hole sitting exactly over the period when Goidelic must have arrived.5

A full pedigree at that depth would need more ancestors than have ever lived, so it collapses completely. Every person alive in Gaelic Scotland or Ireland in 2000 BC who has any living descendants at all is an ancestor of every modern Gael. There is no distinct McFadyen, Ross or Maclaine ancestry at this depth, and anyone selling you one is selling you arithmetic that does not work. Only the direct paternal line stays single and traceable, and everything above is about that thread and about the surrounding population — not about a family.

Here the four lines split into two worlds, and — contrary to the "Dark Ages" label — the western one becomes the best-documented place in northern Britain. Dál Riata was a sea-kingdom straddling the North Channel, north-east Antrim and Argyll separated by nineteen kilometres of water, organised as kindreds. The Senchus fer n-Alban lists them — Cenél nGabráin in Kintyre, Cenél nÓengusa in Islay and Jura, Cenél Loairn in Lorn and probably Mull, Cenél Comgaill in Cowal — and goes down to counting the number of houses in each.810 It does not name these families. It counts the households they lived in, six hundred years before the first McFadyen appears in any charter.

The Cenél Loairn of Lorn and Mull is the ancestral polity of both Hebridean lines, and the Macleans are described as its heirs.812 This matters directly for how 1360 should be read. If the Lochbuie McFadyens were native to Mull, as tradition says, then they and the Maclaines were drawn from the same population, and the later displacement was a change of lordship within one people — not the conquest of one people by another.

Easter Ross and Aberdeenshire were Pictish, not Dál Riatan: a separate kingdom, a separate Brittonic language, a separate political system, and it was the Picts who halted Northumbrian expansion at Dun Nechtain in 685.11 Pictland was gradually Gaelicised as Alba formed, so by the twelfth century Easter Ross was Gaelic-speaking; the Anderson heartland in the north-east went the other way and became Scots-speaking.11 In the early medieval period these four lines were speaking three different languages.

Columba's foundation five miles from Mull became an intellectual centre of European standing; much of the detailed Scottish material in the Irish annals derives from a chronicle kept there, and Adomnán's Life of Columba gives the period a narrative texture no other part of Scotland has.910 The traffic ran outward: Oswald of Northumbria was baptised at Iona in exile and, on taking the throne in 634, sent to Iona for a bishop — Aidan, who founded Lindisfarne the following year. Argyll evangelised Northumbria, not the reverse.

Iona was raided in 795, 802, 806 — sixty-eight monks killed at the spot since called Martyrs' Bay — and 825. The old abandonment narrative is disputed; a scholarly community seems to have stayed, and Iona then had no recorded raid for over 160 years while Dunkeld and Kells, the supposed safe havens, were hit repeatedly.11 The genuinely important consequence is documentary. By the late eighth century the source behind the Annals of Ulster shifted from a chronicle kept on Iona to one kept in Ireland, and reporting of events in western Scotland became less consistent thereafter.11 Argyll did not stop having a history. It stopped having a historian, and the silence runs, with interruptions, to the seventeenth century.

Older uniparental studies gave the higher figures: Scandinavian Y-chromosome ancestry of 22.5% in the Western Isles and Skye.7 Newer autosomal work puts it lower, and puts Argyll lower still — around 7% in the Hebrides, and about 4% in Argyll, little more than mainland Scotland generally, with the Hebrides forming a discrete cluster consistent with a small, long-isolated island population.6 Real, but thin. This is an insular Gaelic population with a light Norse overlay, not a Norse one.

The Kingdom of Alba forms in the ninth century and its centre of gravity moves east to Perthshire, Scone and Dunkeld. Argyll goes from being the cradle of the Scottish kingdom to being its remote western edge — a demotion it never reversed, and which explains a great deal about the next seven hundred years.11 The Hebrides pass under Norse control as the Innse Gall, the islands of the foreigners, against which the name Earra-Ghàidheal, Argyll, the coast of the Gaels, was defined.

Hereditary surnames came into use in Ireland and Scotland between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and in the Gaelic west considerably later than in the Lowlands.1 Any claim of a named chief of any of these four families before about 1100 is fiction — not because the people did not exist, but because the label did not.

From Pàidean, the Scottish Gaelic diminutive of Pàdraig, or Irish Páidín. Both forms sit inside the surname's spelling range, which suggests the name was coined more than once on both sides of the North Channel.1 There is a chronological constraint worth having: through the Middle Ages the Irish held Patrick's name too holy for ordinary use, commemorating him instead with devotional forms such as Gilla Pátraic. The taboo faded earlier in Scotland, and Patrick spread through the English-speaking world from 1200, being taken up enthusiastically in the west of Scotland. That gives a ceiling: the eponymous little Pat most likely lived in the thirteenth century, and there is no deep McFadyen lineage before about 1200, because before that man the family was called something else.

The name is the province, from Celtic ros, a promontory; the clan's own Gaelic name is Clann Anndrais, the children of Andrew.15 The traditional progenitor is Fearchar mac an t-Sagairt, son of the priest. In 1215 he took the young Alexander II's side against a rebellion in Moray and Ross, captured and beheaded its leaders, presented their heads to the king and was knighted — most accounts give the day as 15 June. He was made Earl of Ross in the 1220s, probably 1226, and was certainly styled Comes de Ross by 1232.14 He founded Fearn Abbey and moved it near Tain, and it became the burial place of the earls and chiefs. His death is traditionally put at 1251, from a source the standard account calls spurious; he was certainly dead by the 1250s.14

The traditional account makes Fearchar of the Ó Beólláin family, hereditary co-arbs of St Maelrubha's monastery at Applecross, founded in 672 and with abbots recorded in the Irish annals into the early ninth century.23 Alexander Grant has challenged this as far too thinly evidenced, proposing instead that "son of the priest" points to a background as keeper of the shrine of St Duthac at Tain, with Fearchar simply out of Easter Ross.14 Either way the Ross line is founded on an ecclesiastical office converted into a secular earldom, which is a very Gaelic route to power.

Son of Andrew — the patron saint — which is precisely why the name is not a single-glen surname. Devotion to Andrew was universal, so "Andrew's son" names arose independently across many districts in both Scots- and Gaelic-speaking settings.24 Three forms run in parallel: Anderson, Lowland Scots, concentrated in Aberdeenshire, Banff, Moray, the Mearns, Fife and the Lothians; MacAndrew, the Highland Gaelic form around Inverness and the Moray coast; and Gillanders, from Mac Ghille Anndrais, son of the servant of St Andrew. The earliest bearers on record are David le fiz Andreu, burgess of Peebles, and Duncan fiz Andreu of Dumfries, both swearing fealty to Edward I in 1296.1 Anderson is today the eighth most common surname in Scotland.24

The connection is structural, not decorative. The Highland MacAndrews are associated with Clan Anrias, a sept of Clan Ross, and with the Clan Chattan confederation under Mackintosh; the surnames Andrew and Andrews are counted septs of Clan Ross.15 Given that Clan Ross's own Gaelic name is Clann Anndrais, children of Andrew, Ross and Anderson are the same idea expressed in two languages — at the level of naming, which is not the same as the level of blood.

From Mac Gille Eòin, after Gille-Eathain na Tuaighe, Gillean of the Battleaxe, a thirteenth-century warrior said to have fought at Largs in 1263.12 The fact that matters here: Maclean and Maclaine are the same family, and were the same spelling until about 1600. Gillean's great-grandson Iain Dubh had two sons, Eachann Reaganach and Lachlan Lùbanach, who founded the Maclaines of Lochbuie and the Macleans of Duart respectively; the Lochbuie line wrote "Maclean" until Hector, 8th of Lochbuie, adopted the phonetic spelling.1317 If the Maclaine line here is Lochbuie, then it and the McFadyen line share a single square mile of Mull for six hundred years.

There was no Norman conquest of Scotland. David I invited Anglo-Norman, Breton and Flemish families in — Bruce, Balliol, Comyn, Stewart — bringing feudal tenure, sheriffdoms, royal burghs and, decisively, the charter.11 Feudal tenure requires written title; written title requires registers. Everything recoverable about any of these four families from 1300 onward exists because Scotland adopted a Franco-Norman documentary culture. In Argyll almost none of the substance landed, and the west kept kin-based Gaelic lordship — but the paperwork eventually did.

Balliol against Bruce, Picardy against Normandy. In the west the MacDougall Lords of Lorn, who held Lorn, Mull, Coll, Tiree and Jura from Dunstaffnage, backed the Comyn and Balliol side and lost.26 Everything that happens to the two Hebridean lines over the next sixty years follows from that choice, made by somebody else.

The earliest documented instance of the surname anywhere.1 A caution on the source. Black cites it as RMS II, 3136 — but volume II of the Register of the Great Seal covers 1424 to 1513, so the 1304 deed survives as a recital inside a confirmation registered at least 120 years later, not as an original. Good evidence, and still the earliest there is, but a copy: the name-form has passed through a fifteenth-century clerk's hands before reaching us.

Two literary traditions put a MacPhaden or Makfadyan in Argyll at the same moment, leading Irish troops on the MacDougall and Comyn side against Wallace and being killed for it: Blind Harry's Wallace of about 1477, and a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the MacDonalds.27 Harry wrote nearly two centuries after the events, and Black notes that nothing is known of his Macfadzan in Scottish record outside Harry's pages.1 Two independent traditions agreeing is suggestive. It is not evidence.

Bruce forfeited the MacDougalls, and their lands passed by way of the Crown to the emerging MacDonald Lordship of the Isles. A sheriffdom of Argyll was created to hold shrieval authority over Lorn, and in 1354 the exiled MacDougall heir quitclaimed any right over Mull to the Lord of the Isles, detaching Mull from Lorn permanently.26 In the north over the same span, Uilleam II, 3rd Earl of Ross, changed sides during the wars; his son Walter was killed at Bannockburn; and Aodh, the 4th Earl, was a favourite of Robert the Bruce and married the king's sister.15

John of Islay, 1st Lord of the Isles, granted lands on Mull to two brothers of Clan Gillean: Lachlan Lùbanach at Duart, and Eachann Reaganach at Lochbuie. Hector's grant was of four score merks of land that had been occupied by the McFadyens.1716 What followed survives in two versions that are mirror images of each other. In the Maclaine telling, Hector got permission to build a fortalice, and when it was finished climbed to the top and put an arrow through the bone the McFadyen chief was eating from; the chief remarked that it was time he was leaving, and gave no further trouble.1617 In the McFadyen telling, Hector proposed shared occupation, offered to restore the McFadyen watchtower for mutual protection, then used the finished castle to make war, and killed their chief with the arrow during a truce feast.20 Both were written down centuries later by interested parties and neither is evidence. What is not in doubt is the outcome: from about 1360 the McFadyens hold Lochbuie land as dependants of the Maclaines rather than in their own right.

J. G. Campbell recorded the corollary tradition — that on being expelled they became a wandering craft-kindred, Sliochd nan òr-cheard, the race of goldsmiths — with the Maclean account putting their resettlement at Garmony.191 From this point the two Mull lines are structurally bound: the same ground, one as tenant and one as lord, for the next four hundred years.

For a century and a half the MacDonald Lordship of the Isles ran with its own council, law, learned orders and archive. The chiefs of Duart and Lochbuie were two of the four great nobles on the Council of the Isles, and Donald Monro, Dean of the Isles, described them in 1549 as among "the Iles best barons."2817 The Lordship's own archive did not survive its fall. That single fact is the largest reason the west has no records for this period, and it is why the McFadyens of the fifteenth century are almost invisible while their Lowland contemporaries are not.

Uilleam III, 5th Earl of Ross, married a daughter of Aonghus Óg Mac Domhnaill, Lord of Islay, and died in 1372 without sons — the last chief of Clan Ross to hold the earldom. His daughter's claim failed and the Earldom of Ross passed to the MacDonald Lords of the Isles.15 So for the best part of a century the same man was Lord of the Isles and Earl of Ross: overlord of Mull, which is McFadyen and Maclaine ground, and of Easter Ross, which is Ross ground. If there is a single moment when three of these four lines shared a political roof, this is it. Meanwhile the Ross chiefship went to Hugh Ross of Rarichies, first of Balnagown, from 1374, and the chiefs have been "of Balnagown" ever since.15

The Treaty of Westminster–Ardtornish of 1462, in which John MacDonald secretly treated with Edward IV, was revealed by the English court in 1475. The Earldom of Ross was forfeited to the Crown in 1476, and the Lordship of the Isles itself in 1493.1526 For Ross, the earldom was gone permanently and the Balnagown chiefs became regional lairds rather than provincial magnates. For Maclaine, Iain Òg, 5th of Lochbuie, took a royal charter from James IV in March 1494 — two years ahead of the Duart chief — converting the family from vassals of the Lord of the Isles into tenants-in-chief of the Crown.17 For McFadyen, no change of any kind that anyone recorded.

Almost nothing survives of the McFadyens in the fifteenth century, and the nothing is instructive. What does survive is churchmen and Lowlanders — Conghan MacPaden petitioning for the archdeaconry of Argyll in 1390, John McFadyeane on record in Edinburgh in 1457, a composition with Donald M'Fadzeane in Kirkcudbright in 1473, Hugh McFattin as tenant of Mydcoule in Petty in 1499.1 That is not a random sample of McFadyens. The ones who appear are precisely the ones who left the Gaelic world or entered the Church — the people who touched institutions with writing desks.

James V toured the Hebrides in 1540, compelling the chiefs to accompany him, and the apparatus of the state began, slowly, to write the Highlands down — a process completed by the Statutes of Iona in 1609 and the Register of Sasines in 1617, both just outside this document's window.26

Murdoch, Murchadh Gearr, Short Murdoch, the sixth: forced to flee to Antrim in 1539 when his uncle, backed by Duart, seized the estates, and back within the year to retake Moy Castle with the help of the MacCormacks. John, Iain Mòr, the seventh: a renowned swordsman who killed an Italian master-at-arms in a tournament in Edinburgh, and the last Lochbuie chief to use two deerhounds as supporters to his arms. Hector, the eighth: the first chief to write the name Maclaine, and a man who fought with the MacDonalds of Islay against his own kin of Duart at Tràigh Ghruinneart in 1598.131718 The orthographic split that makes a Maclaine line a distinguishable object at all happens at the very end of this period.

The clerical thread continues and the name starts appearing in Islay, Iona and the south-west: Donald Macfadzane, precentor in Lismore in 1507 and 1511, probably the same man as Sir Donald McFadzeane, chaplain of Tibbermore, whose death is recorded in 1540; a M'Faden on Iona in 1532, and Finlay M'Fedden, canon of the Isles, witnessing a charter of Muckairn; William M'Fadzean witnessing a sasine at Blairquhan in Ayrshire in 1618; and the twenty-shilling land of Balmacfadzeane in Wigtownshire in 1628.1 That last marks the south-western cluster — the Galloway and Ayrshire MacFadzeans, almost certainly a separate Gallovidian coining of the same patronymic rather than migrants from Mull.

It is not a z. It is the Middle Scots letter yogh, which printers replaced with z because their fonts had no yogh — the same quirk that gives Menzies and Dalziel.22 MacFadzean and MacFadyen were originally pronounced the same, and Black groups fourteen spellings under one head.1 The spelling guide on the heritage page carries the dated forms in full.

The Balnagown chiefs consolidate as Easter Ross lairds through the century, with Fearn Abbey as the family burial place.15 Anderson does something different: this is the century in which the name becomes visible as a family rather than a patronymic. Andersons sit in burgh government through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Forman-Workman armorial of 1566 records arms for "Anderson of that Ilk," implying a recognised representer by that date, and the Aberdeenshire properties become associated with the family from the early 1600s.24 Anderson is the only one of the four that gets more documentable during this period rather than less — because burgh and Lowland records survive where Hebridean ones do not.

Not because more was happening. Because the machinery changed. And for Argyll the delay is far worse than for the Lowlands: the Tiree marriage and McPhaiden baptism registers used by the standard genealogical study of the family begin in 1766.21 The real Hebridean gap runs to the middle of the eighteenth century, not to 1600.