5o8 CRAWFORD Sir David Lindsay of Crawford), sue. his father Oct. 1381 ; Justiciary, 1389; Sheriff of Banff; and is celebrated for having, on St. George's Day, 1390, as the representative of the Scottish chivalry, unhorsed the English champion, John, Lord Welle (formerly Ambassador to Scotland), in the presence of King Richard II and his Court, on London Bridge. In 1397 he sue. his cousin, Sir James Lindsay (who d. s.p.m.), in the Barony of Crawford,(^) in Clydesdale, and other entailed estates of the house of Lindsay, of which he then became the Chief. He was, " by solemn belting and investiture in the Pari, held at Perth," 2 1 Apr. to 2 May 1 3 gSjC") cr. EARL noticed in the text is he in whom there first existed an hereditary Peerage of the kind now recognised. The Lindsays claim that " the predecessors of the ist Earl of Crawford were Barons, at the period of the earliest Parliamentary records, and that, in fact, they were never ennobled in the modern sense of the term, but were among the Pares, of which Kings are Prims, from the commencement of recorded history." (*) The great mountain territory of Crawford, in Clydesdale, forms the southern extremity of Lanarkshire, and, being the highest district in the south of Scotland, was sometimes called the south Highlands. It was held by the family of Lindsay certainly as early as the 12th century, till the close of the 15th, when it passed to the family of Douglas, of the house of Angus. C") The Earldom of Crawford was but "the third created since the extinction of the Celtic Dynasty [1290]; that of Douglas [1357] having been the second, and that of Moray [of which 1 31 2, the charter being undated, is the probable date] the first." Two other then [1398] existing Earldoms, Mar and Sutherland, claimed an antiquity long prior. The question of precedency between the Earldom of Crawford and that of Sutherland, was, at the Union, 1707, "settled or rather reaffirmed, after long and learned investigations, in favour of the Earls of Crawford, who rank, accord- ingly, as Premier Scottish Earls on the Union Roll. If date of creation were the sole criterion, there is no doubt but that the Earldom of Mar would take precedence of all other existing British Earldoms, and that of Sutherland, would, in Scotland, assume the second place. Precedence, however, did not depend, in Scotland, exclusively on the date of creation; the will of the Sovereign and other collateral circumstances con- trolled it. For example, the Earls of Argyle, of later creation by 60 years, took pre- cedence of those of Crawford, in virtue of the hereditary High Justiciarship of Scotland, bestowed upon the family in the 1 6th century; the Earls of Angus, similarly, had received a grant of perpetual precedency over all other Earls in Scotland, and they were accordingly ranked first, before those of Argyle, though much more recent than either Sutherland or Mar. Crawford can assert no such grant, nor were there any great public offices hereditary in the family, such as those possessed by Argyle, and yet, whether through the non-appearance of the Earls of Sutherland in Pari, previously to the year 1477, whether, through the honours having lapsed to female heirs, or through whatever cause, it was a fact that the Earldoms of Sutherland and Mar had lost the precedence, and that Crawford possessed it; and on this immemorial usage and prescription the family lawyers rested their defence on the two great occasions when the question was mooted [viz.^ in 1606, when the' Ranking of the Nobility' took place at the command of James I (with a view to settle the feuds then existing regarding precedence), and at the Union in 1707, at both which times the sentence was given in favour of the Earl of Crawford." See Lives of the Lindsays. To this it may be added that these Earls long held a position and influence beyond that of any others of that rank, excepting only the Earls of Douglas.
