Turnbull History

One of the valleys that runs north out of the Cheviots into Teviotdale carries Rule water to its parent river. It is one of those pockets in which the most ancient stock of any country might survive, taking in the new blood of successive immigrants or conquerors, yet retaining an original identity. Bedrule lies in the recesses of hills that had once divided the Welsh-speaking kingdom of Gododdin from English Northumbria, and later formed the debatable land between Scotland and England. It is the original cradle of a tribe called the Turnbulls.
The earliest record of them appears in the time of the Anglo-Norman Kings of Scots. A Richard de Rullos is named there in 1130: a Gilbertus de Behulle in 1248. The district itself is called Terra de Rul in 1 266. But it seems unlikely that its inhabitants descend from one of the Anglo-Norman families whom the Scottish Kings brought from England or France. The name Turnbull, and its legendary origin, suggest quite different affinities. Hector Boece related this legend as historical fact in 1526, in his account of the manner in which a man named Roull saved the life of King Robert Bruce in the forest of Callander, from a wild boar or bull. ‘After the beast felt himself sore wounded, he rushed upon the King who, having no weapon in his hand, had surely perished if help had not come. Howbeit, one came running unto him who overthrew the bull by plain force, and held him down until the hunters came who killed him outright. For this valiant act the King endowed the aforesaid party with great possessions, and his lineage to this day is called of the Turnbull. Had this been historical fact, it would provide supporting evidence that Robert I had planted a Turnbull in Bedrule in the same way as he planted a Burnett at Banchory, for services rendered. But in addition to the negative evidence, there is the positive presence of a William "dicto Turnbull"in records earlier than Bruce' s reign. In any case, the heroic progenitor of the tribe who slays a dangerous wild beast belongs to the stock-in-trade of Celtic legend. The Mac Leods have a version of it, and the oldest one of all in Scotland was brought among the Ossianic tales from Ireland. In this one, Diarmaid, legendary progenitor of Clan Campbell, kills the wild boar in Gaelic ballad and folk tale. The principal difference between the Campbell and Mac Leod versions on the one hand and the Turnbull one on the other is that of language. The Welsh of the Gododdin epic-Scotland' s earliest poem-had given way to English over a thousand years before the poet of the Turnbull country, John Leyden, wrote in 1801:

His arms robust the hardy hunter flung
Around his bending horns, and upward wrung,
With writhing force his neck retorted round,
And rolled the panting monster to the ground,
Crushed, with enormous strength, his bony skull;
And courtiers hailed the man who turned the bull.

Leyden has identified the beast as a bison a few lines earlier. But it is a bull's head that is incorporated into the coat-of-arms of Turnbull, as of Mac Leod, while the Campbell heraldry contains a boar's head. But heraldry was a form of military identification introduced into Scotland from about the 12th century, with all the other kit of the Norman feudal system. It made use of the emblems of an older society, as well as introducing those of the newcomers. The three bulls' heads of Turnbull (variously adorned in later matriculations) appear to belong to a pre-heraldic, Celtic past like the legend that accounts for them. But they were displayed in many a Border battle, and notably at the defeat of Halidon Hill in 1333, when a Turnbull knight challenged any one of the enemy to single combat.

By the time of John Leyden the poet (1775-1811), the Turnbull country stood on the threshold of the industrial revolution. He was born in the village of Denholm near the junction of Rule water and the Teviot, and joined Sir Walter Scott in collecting their Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, that monument to a vanishing way of life and its traditions. The greater part of Denholm was owned at this time by John Turnbull (1735-1816), whose wife was Jane Leyden; and the lives of their descendants illustrate the great dispersal that was about to take place in the rural Scotland of the clans. Their son Joshua (1785-1828) became a lawyer in Glasgow, where he died leaving an only son Thomas, aged four. Thomas Turnbull (1824-1908) qualified as an architect, married a Scottish wife, and then emigrated. He settled first in San Francisco in the turbulent days that Stevenson depicted in The Wreckers. There he built a number of churches and other public buildings before moving on to New Zealand in the latter days of the Maori wars. His earthquake-resistant buildings in Wellington all withstood the 1942 earthquakes there. But he was not the only Scot of his name among the immigrants there, and his own descendants have multiplied until the name is probably commoner in the antipodes today than in Bedrule. When Thomas Turnbull died, a monument of Aberdeen granite was brought all the way from Scotland to commemorate him, while another of his name founded New Zealand's Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.