The Porteous family is a Scottish Borders armigerous family.
The Porteous family is a Scottish Borders armigerous family.
The earliest records for members of the Porteous family in Peeblesshire date back to the early part of the fifteenth century.
The earliest possible reference, according to Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh, is to a Guillaume Porteuse (later William Porteous), who arrived from Normandy c 1400 under the patronage of the wealthy Fraise family (later to become the Frasers). They had already settled in parts of lowland Scotland, having been granted lands by the King.
The early meaning of the name Porteuse (from the French) was indeed possibly of 'courier' or 'messenger'. But in Scotland, they turned their hand to other trades. In the days when the glens and hamlets of Tweeddale and, later, Annandale were much more densely populated than today, they seem to have pursued various occupations – from millers and blacksmiths to ministers of religion.
The home of early members of the Porteous family for many hundreds of years was Hawkshaw in Peeblesshire. The link to modern day families is as yet unproven. There is some doubt as to how long the family had held the ancestral family home, but it is certain that there was a castle of sorts at Hawkshaw, probably built as no more than a small fortified keep, and intended as a watch tower where a signal fire could be lit to warn of approaching danger. A line of these so-called Peel towers was built in the 1430s across the Tweed valley from Berwick to its source, as a response to the dangers of attacks from the Border reivers. Hawkshaw was one of over two dozen of these in Peeblesshire alone.
During the eighteenth century there began a massive migration of families from Scotland, initially to England and Ireland – and eventually to the New World and the newly discovered countries of the British Empire.
The reasons for this were many – and changed considerably during the following three hundred years. The historical background was turbulent and Scotland saw many changes which led to emigration of large numbers of both Highland and Lowland families.
The Lowland Clearances (1760–1830), especially, resulted in a massive movement of poor Scots from the Lowlands to the growing industrial centres of Glasgow and northern England – to Newcastle, Liverpool and eventually to London and other large cities and ports. Families were tempted by the offer of employment in the fast-growing industries which had burgeoned with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the promise of a higher standard of living.
The subsequent depopulation of the Lowlands and the Highland Potato Famine of 1836–37 added to those who chose to leave. Over 1.7 million people left Scotland from 1846 to 1852, primarily going to Nova Scotia and Canada. They left in vast numbers to seek better fortune on the other side of the Atlantic. [1]
Branches of the family having emigrated to five continents, there is an active family research group which seeks to help family members seeking more information about their ancestors. The cairn at Hawkshaw has, over the years, become a place of pilgrimage for members of the Porteous family, and an international reunion was traditionally held at the nearby Crook Inn, Tweedsmuir every five years, attracting visitors from all over the world. In September 2021 it is planned that the celebrations will be held nearby, as the inn has been bought by a Tweedsmuir community group and is currently being refurbished.
A Scottish clan is a kinship group among the Scottish people. Clans give a sense of shared heritage and descent to members, and in modern times have an official structure recognised by the Court of the Lord Lyon, which regulates Scottish heraldry and coats of arms. Most clans have their own tartan patterns, usually dating from the 19th century, which members may incorporate into kilts or other clothing.
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Beilby Porteus, successively Bishop of Chester and of London, was a Church of England reformer and a leading abolitionist in England. He was the first Anglican in a position of authority to seriously challenge the Church's position on slavery.
Hawkshaw is a pair of semi-detached houses on the River Tweed, two miles southwest of Tweedsmuir in the Scottish Borders. Historically part of Peeblesshire, the original village of Hawkshaw was destroyed when the Fruid Reservoir was constructed in 1963, and is remembered as the ancestral family home of the Porteous family, dating from at least 1439.
The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland was a series of changes in agricultural practice that began in the 17th century and continued in the 19th century. They began with the improvement of Scottish Lowlands farmland and the beginning of a transformation of Scottish agriculture from one of the least modernised systems to what was to become the most modern and productive system in Europe. The traditional system of agriculture in Scotland generally used the runrig system of management, which had possibly originated in the Late Middle Ages. The basic pre-improvement farming unit was the baile and the fermetoun. In each, a small number of families worked open-field arable and shared grazing. Whilst run rig varied in its detail from place to place, the common defining detail was the sharing out by lot on a regular basis of individual parts ("rigs") of the arable land so that families had intermixed plots in different parts of the field.
The Lowland Clearances were one of the results of the Scottish Agricultural Revolution, which changed the traditional system of agriculture which had existed in Lowland Scotland in the seventeenth century. Thousands of cottars and tenant farmers from the southern counties (Lowlands) of Scotland migrated from farms and small holdings they had occupied to the new industrial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and northern England or abroad, or remaining upon land though adapting to the Scottish Agricultural Revolution.
The Highland Potato Famine was a period of 19th-century Highland and Scottish history over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands saw their potato crop repeatedly devastated by potato blight. It was part of the wider food crisis facing Northern Europe caused by potato blight during the mid-1840s, whose most famous manifestation is the Great Irish Famine, but compared with its Irish counterpart, it was much less extensive and took many fewer lives as prompt and major charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom ensured relatively little starvation.
Tweedsmuir is a village and civil parish in Tweeddale, the Scottish Borders Council district, southeastern Scotland.
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The Crook Inn is an inn in the Scottish Borders, near the village of Tweedsmuir on the A701 road between Broughton and Moffat. It is one of many claimants to be the oldest inn in Scotland. It was licensed in 1604. Robert Burns wrote "Willie Wastle's Wife" there. It has served as a coaching inn, a Post Office and source of employment. In the early 20th century a halt was built on the Talla Railway to serve it. The inn attracted much passing trade from the labourers who were building the Talla Reservoir, which the railway was built to serve.
Hawkshaw may refer to:
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Porteous is the name of a Scottish Borders armigerous family. Notable members of the Porteous family include:
The Scottish people or Scots are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Angles of Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century.
The demographic history of Scotland includes all aspects of population history in what is now Scotland. The earliest surviving archaeological evidence of human settlement is of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments. These suggest a highly mobile boat-using people, probably with a very low density of population. Neolithic farming brought permanent settlements dating from 3500 BC, and greater concentrations of population. Evidence of hillforts and other buildings suggest a growing settled population. Changes in the scale of woodland indicates that the Roman invasions from the first century AD had a negative impact on the native population.
Sir Thomas Martin Devine is a Scottish academic and author who specializes in the history of Scotland. He was knighted and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to Scottish historiography, and is known for his overviews of modern Scottish history. He is an advocate of the total history approach to the history of Scotland. He is professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and was formerly a professor at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Aberdeen.