Gordon

This second edition of Gordon: A Clan History asks what Bydand, the family's word for standing fast, cost and earned the people who carried the name.

On Holy Rood Day 1402, under English arrows on Homildon Hill, Adam, lord of Gordon, knelt before Sir John Swinton, his family's old enemy, asked to be knighted by his hand, and went down the hill beside him to die.

The Gordons came out of a Berwickshire parish, took Strathbogie from Robert Bruce and for three centuries held the north-east as the Crown's lieutenants and its rebels. The book follows them through the record: an earl's daughter married to the pretender Perkin Warbeck, the 4th Earl's corpse tried for treason, the charge at Glenlivet in 1594, the fire at Frendraught, the laird of Haddo beheaded in his linen shirt, and the 2nd Marquess's answer to the Covenanters: "You may take my Head from my shoulders, but not my Heart from my Soveraigne."

It stays with the people below the chiefs: tenants on the 1696 poll book, men marched out for the Prince in 1745, a prisoner shipped to the plantations and freed on Martinique, and the crofters of Barra and South Uist, shipped to Quebec in 1851 by a Gordon landlord, who told a royal commission in 1883 what it had cost them. It follows the name to Moscow, Savannah, Prince Edward Island and Adelaide.

With the chiefs and the houses of the name, places to visit, a chronology, a records guide for tracing a Gordon line, and in print a full index.

For readers who carry the name, or descend from someone who did. Complete in itself.