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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