Robert ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor (1671-1734) is undoubtedly the most famous outlaw in Scottish history. This ‘Scottish Robin Hood’ is often described as a bandit or brigand, part of the same criminal fraternity as, for example, Rome’s Marco Sciarra (d.1593) or France’s Louis Dominique Bouguignon (d.1721). Yet in many ways, Rob Roy, more a debtor-on-the-run than a career robber, sits uncomfortably in such company. 40 years before he was born, however, Scotland had already endured the career of another outlaw whose activities map much more closely onto the classic understanding of banditry, and whose contemporary reputation makes him a more plausible candidate than Rob Roy for the dubious title of Scotland’s most infamous brigand. This was Patrick MacGregor (d.1636), better known by his epithet ‘Gilderoy’ (an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Gille Ruadh, meaning ‘red-haired boy’), and his bloody story offers a fascinating window on issues of criminality, marginality and political control in the early modern world.
Banditry and the ‘highland problem’
The 17th century was the golden age of banditry in Scotland. A range of notorious brigands made their mark during this period. There was Alasdair MacRanald, who reportedly terrorised the southern highlands with a crew up to 200-strong in the 1600s and 1610; Donald MacDonald alias Halket Stirk (‘spotted bullock’), famed as the ‘ringleader’ of all the bandits in the lawless Lochaber region by the 1650s; Patrick Roy MacGregor, who rampaged throughout Angus, Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the 1660s; the MacGibbon brothers, responsible for a huge array of violent attacks predominantly in Stirlingshire during the 1670s; Alexander Roy MacGregor, killed while trying to mount a night-time raid on the town of Crieff in 1684; and Alasdair Mor (‘Big Alasdair’), whose botched trial in 1701-02 caused a miniature political scandal.
What these men, and most other Scottish bandits, had in common was that they originated from, and operated predominantly in, the highlands. Highland Scotland had since at least the 14th century been subject to a pejorative ‘othering’ discourse on the part of lowlanders, castigating the region, and its inhabitants, as alien, backward, lawless and generally barbaric. Banditry slotted easily into this narrative, seeming to confirm the inveterate brutishness of the Gaels and providing ample ammunition for
