Note 496 — Chapter IX · THE CLANS AND THEIR GENEALOGIES.

In a History of the Drummonds, compiled in 1861, the first Alwyn, there called Malise, is made a son of Ferchad, Earl of Stratherne, and marries Ada, daughter of David, earl of Huntingdon.

This spurious descent of the earls of Lennox from the Northumbrian Archill was questioned by Lord Hailes, and rightly rejected by Mr. Robertson in his Scotland under her Early Kings, and by Mr. Cosmo Innes, but has again been revived by Mr. W. Fraser in his book of The Lennox, who is unable to produce any further authority for it than that it must have been received from the Laird of Macfarlane, because it appears in Douglas’s Peerage, to which that distinguished antiquary contributed some of the materials, and that the old earls of Lennox are called by the Gaelic bards ‘Siol Arkyll,’ that is, descendants of Arkill, but in both instances he is mistaken, for Douglas took his statement from Crawford, and it is not true that the old earls were ever called by the Gaelic bards ‘Siol Arkyll,’ and Mr. Fraser gives no authority for the statement.