1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lindsay (family)

LINDSAY, the family name of the earls of Crawford. The family is one of great antiquity in Scotland, the earliest to settle in that country being Sir Walter de Lindesia, who attended David, earl of Huntingdon, afterwards King David I., in his colonization of the Lowlands early in the 12th century. The descendants of Sir Walter divided into three branches, one of which held the baronies of Lamberton in Scotland, and Kendal and Molesworth in England; another held Luffness and Crawford in Scotland and half Limesi in England; and a third held Breneville and Byres in Scotland and certain lands, not by baronial tenure, in England. The heads of all these branches sat as barons in the Scottish parliament for more than two hundred years before the elevation of the chief of the house to an earldom in 1398. The Lindsays held the great mountain district of Crawford in Clydesdale, from which the title of the earldom is derived, from the 12th century till the close of the 15th, when it passed to the Douglas earls of Angus. See Crawford, Earls of.

See A. W. C. Lindsay, afterwards earl of Crawford, Lives of the Lindsays, or a Memoir of the Houses of Crawford and Belcarres (3 vols., 1843 and 1858).