Sinclair Hospitality

[Natrossinc@aol.com]

Hi clan.I was following some of the dialogue on tolerance,bigotry and 
spiritual allegiances of various kinds and I seem to recall that in a 
fiercely Protestant Scotland, our hero ,Sir William St Clair (of Rosslyn 
Chapel fame) remained otherwise
--in fact fiercely Catholic.(Im not beating my own chest here as this is not 
my personal persuasion).Very downtrodden at the time were the Gypsies  that 
roamed Scotland and many of them were declared thoroughly heathen and sent to 
'the gibbet in the Burrow Moore ,ready to be strangled'.William befriended 
these folk and allowed then to camp on Sinclair land at Rosslyn where they 
would arrive each May to perform their May Day  festival. William was very 
fond of  the story of Robin Hood and of course the Gypsies would ennact this 
story. Lusty 'Robins' were selected who would await fair maidens in the 
nearby woods.The Puritan diarist,Philip Stubbes, would lament that out of a 
hundred maidens who went into the woods to encounter the local Robin Hood and 
Green Men on May Night,'scarcely the third part of them returned home again 
undefiled'.I believe the progeny of May Night were called the 'Sons of Robin' 
or 'Robinsons'.I hope I do noone a disservive by penning this as Im sure 
there was another more noble origin for Robinsons.However-I digress.
The apparent moral of the story (to me anyway) was that my very distant 
ancestor dared to swim against the flow spiritually,was a champion of the 
downtrodden and showed much more tolerance for others than was historically 
normal for that era.
An example for me at least
Cheers
Ross Sinclair (Melbourne)
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