The High Council is pleased to add two important papers to our collection of Learned and Scholarly Papers.
The first is a paper is entitled PEDIGREES, POWER AND CLANSHIP: THE GENEALOGICAL WORK OF DAVID SELLAR collected and edited by Hector L. MacQueen. William David Hamilton Sellar, MVO, FRHistS, FSA (Scot), FRHSC (Hon) (27 February 1941 – 26 January 2019) was a legal historian who served as Lord Lyon King of Arms from 2008 to 2014.
The collection demonstrates Mr Sellar’s capacity for bringing into play and persuasively tying together many different strands of evidence, be they made up of documents, heraldry, material culture or oral tradition. His work transformed his field and many of the pieces gathered in the published collection remain foundational for their subjects and the discipline as a whole.
The second paper is by Mr Seller entitled THE ORIGINS AND ANCESTRY OF SOMERLED. It was his first published article. The debut was nevertheless something of a tour de force, and it was to command its field for the next 40 years. The subject-matter was the genealogies or pedigrees of the twelfth-century “founder of a new dynasty of Hebridean sea-kings and ancestor of the MacDonalds” who was killed in battle at Renfrew in 1164 while leading a rising against the king of Scots. The pedigrees were found mainly in various late medieval and early modern Irish sources but also in a Scottish manuscript known from its probable date as ‘MS 1467’