Street in Dysart, Fife, in 1920s, with a traditional Scottish towerhouse shown in foreground

‘Give Me Your Hand’: Fife connections for this traditional tune

by

Image: The Towers, Dysart, Fife image from author’s own collection. The Towers, in Dysart’s East Quality Street, was an elegant townhouse built in 1589, which the Wemyss family would have known.  Little remains of their own house along the coast from that period.

Soundyngs welcomes guest-author Keith Sanger, to tell us more about a tune discussed earlier this summer in connection with debates over Scottish clarsairs and their music.

For a long time, the background to this tune has been dominated by a claim made by the Irish harper Arthur O’Neill in his memoir taken down around 1808, that the tune had been composed by the harper ‘Rory Dall O’Cathain’ for Lady Eglinton circa 1603. It is first on record in Ireland under the Latin version of the name as ‘Da Mihi Manum’, in the Neal Collection of the most Celebrated Irish Tunes published in 1724 and substantially the same version was included by Edward Bunting in his 1840 publication under the Gaelic form of the name as Tabhair dam do lamh, with the attribution ‘Rory Dall O’Caghan 1603’, (the only surviving copy of the Neal publication which makes no claim for a composer, is the one which had been owned by Bunting since 1794).

Set against that background the fact that the two earliest versions of the tune under that Latin title of ‘Da Mihi Manum’ occur in Scotland, more specifically in two manuscripts compiled in the neighbouring estates of Wemyss and Balcarres, in Fife, has never aroused much interest, or indeed why it should have a Latin form of the name. Dated respectively to 1643 and circa 1700, the manuscripts were written for the lute with the first apparently by Margaret Wemyss the daughter of the heir to the Wemyss earldom. However, two recent studies, one of the tune itself and a second challenging not just Arthur O’Neil’s story but also the actual existence of a harper called Rory Dall O’Cathain, means that it is possible to focus just on the background to the tunes first appearance and the Wemyss family connections (Hennegan, 2022; and Sanger, 2025).

While studies of both manuscripts have been undertaken, they have understandably concentrated mainly on the music with an acceptance regarding ‘Da Mihi Manum’ that it was associated with the Irish Rory Dall, and with little attempt to place the use of the lute in Scotland in its wider historical background. Lute playing was a minority taste which even at its peak was confined to the royal court and courtiers; well before James VI and I departed to England it was in decline, with the last professional lute player on record at court circa 1579/80. This in turn poses the question of who then taught the aristocratic ladies who apparently played the lute and compiled the lute manuscripts written in tablature during the 17th century? Although the Balcarres manuscript does name some professional musicians as the sources of some of the contents, specifically a ‘Mr Beck’, both he and a ‘Mr MacLachlan’ (and it is not clear which of two musicians of that name is meant) were players of the viol not the lute (Sanger, 2013).

Which returns to the problem of who taught some young aristocratic ladies to play the lute, and the probable answer is, other aristocratic ladies, mostly using instruments which had been passed down through their families since there is little evidence for a market in or purchase of lutes. Nor, despite dues for lute strings being listed in the customs tariffs published in 1612, is there much evidence for the purchase of strings among the contemporary financial accounts, which do, however, include a trap for the unwary. A glossy silk fabric known as ‘lustring’ was assimilated into Scots as ‘lute strings’ and does make many appearances especially among clothing accounts.

That the playing and teaching of the lute should be confined to a small number of aristocratic ladies does fit the background of the period. Even for women at the top end of society, educational options were very limited and there was absolutely no possibility of pursuing a profession. Aristocratic males, on the other hand, had the possibility of formal school and university education and could pursue careers in the military, church, law and government administration. For ladies, the one acceptable pursuit other than the mundane social options of being an aristocratic lady wife was that of music, but purely as an amateur, that is, irrespective of actual ability; they could not being seen to perform or teach in a structured professional manner.

The first appearance of “Da Mihi Manum” occurs in a lute manuscript commenced in 1643 when Margaret Wemyss, the young lady associated with it, was 12 years old. According to a letter written by her mother and dated 17 May 1648 she was seriously ill, and the tone of the letter suggests not expected to live (in the event, she died aged just 17) (NRS, GD 3/5/417). Her mother died the following year and so her father, David, heir to the earldom of Wemyss remarried. Misfortune continued: his second wife died in 1652, and in 1653 he was married for a 3rd time to Margaret Leslie, daughter of the earl of Rothes. It was also her third marriage, she having first married to Lord Balgonie, heir to the Earl of Leven, in 1636. After the death of her first husband, she married the earl of Buccleuch in 1646, then, following his death in 1651, to David Wemyss who she would already have known well from her first marriage as the Balgonie/Leven estate neighboured that of Wemyss and it is the Buccleuch connection which brings us back to the beginning.

Francis, Earl of Buccleuch, was 7 years old when he inherited his title in 1633. Three years later he was sent first to school then university in St Andrews where he remained until 1642. At that period the school seems to have had a leaning towards teaching music: at least that is the interpretation to be placed on the testament of Christian Murray dated 1654, which refers to her father as ‘umqhile George Murray Maister of the musitiane schoole in St Andrews. This is further confirmed by the testament of her mother, Margaret Ingles, in 1679 which refers to her as relict of umqhile George Murray sometym school master in St Andrews. Since the couple had two children whose births were recorded in St Andrews in 1630 and 1633, then the teaching of music certainly spans the period that the young Earl of Buccleuch was living in St Andrews. (NRS CC20/4/10; CC20/4/14; OPR453/10/22; OPR453/10/44).

However, even with that background documentation, an interest in music by the young man can only be inferred.  A much closer musical connection can be seen from his relationship with a violer named Robert Scott, whose importance in the musical life of the time seems to have slipped the notice of histories of music in Scotland. Although the Buccleuch family name was also ‘Scott’, there is no evidence that the violer was a close relation and he first appears with his marriage in Edinburgh in 1610. Edinburgh was to remain his main base, and he would go on to become a burgess as well as acquiring sufficient wealth to lend money to Alexander Hay, a member of the Hay landed family, who practiced law as a Writer to the Signet. When Sir John Grant of Grant made a business trip to Edinburgh in 1620, he appears to have been so taken by the musician that he gave him the fairly large sum of thirty-six shillings, and it seems to have been a factor in the introduction of the viol into the Grant lands of Strathspey (Sanger, 2022).

While the young Earl of Buccleuch also patronised the violer when visiting Edinburgh what is more significant is that on several occasions Robert Scott travelled up to St Andrews to perform for the Earl. The usual route from Edinburgh or the Buccleuch estates to St Andrews was the sea crossing over the Forth between Leith and Burntisland and from there, the coastal road which passed right through the Wemyss estate. At that time aristocratic travellers would normally have received hospitality from their peers on route, so the young earl and Margaret Wemyss were bound to have met. Given the musical resources the young Earl had at his command, and that the title ‘Da Mihi Manum’ in Scots as ‘Give me your hand’ almost begs to be completed with ‘in marriage’, it might reflect some romantic interest between the couple.

That possibility may also explain why the tune has a title in Latin which at that time was the language of a university education and the young man seemed proud enough of his Latin that while only 14 years old he signed a document not with the normal signature of an earl, which in his case would have been just ‘Buccleuch’, but with a Latin signature of Comes Franciseus Scotus.  The slightly unconventional Latinisation of ‘Francis ‘ brings to mind the odd spelling of ‘miche’ in the manuscript. One further coincidence is that at the time the music book was started, Margaret Wemyss and the earl were at or just past the earliest legal age in Scotland for marriage, which was 12 years for a female and 14 for a male. (This did not change under Scots law until 1929, although it was thought that no-one had married that young for quite some time, as it otherwise would have been noticed and the law changed earlier).

If the background to the composition of “Da Mihi Manum” was a case of unrequited love, the question arises, why there should be no other record of it? Ironically a possible answer is easy given the political background from circa 1640 until the Restoration. How much the young lady saw of her father is a moot point as he was at that time heavily involved in the ongoing military actions in the 1640s, so she might have been under less careful paternal oversight. Likewise, the Earl – although still quite a young man – as the holder of an important earldom was being drawn into the political and military manoeuvrings, while at that time, for such dynastic marriages, required the involvement and approval of the king himself. In fact, three years later in 1646 the Earl was to marry the widowed Margaret Leslie who was five years his senior, in what looks like a politically arranged marriage (she had, before widowhood, produced the heir to the Leven earldom; after her marriage to Francis she produced the heiress to the Buccleuch earldom, and after her later marriage to Wemyss, she became the mother of the heiress to that earldom as well).

Margaret Leslie may have also had a role in the Wemyss music manuscript, which would help explain one of its problems which is rarely mentioned and never explained. Most discussions about the manuscript mention that the name Margaret Wemyss appears several times but ignore that on some occasions the name is prefixed by ‘Mrs’. This is odd as it is the contraction for Scots ‘Maistres’ (various spellings), and for a girl just entering her teens, no matter how mature for her years or precocious, to use “Mrs” to describe herself is unlikely. There are no precedents given in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, nor do any of the examples given there fit with the circumstances. If she just wanted to boost her standing, then using ‘Lady’ would have served and would have been an accurate usage whatever her age.

So, returning to Margaret Leslie.  From her first marriage in 1636, at which time Margaret Wemyss would have been 6 years of age, to the second marriage to Buccleuch in 1646, Margaret Leslie would have been living at her husband’s home of Balgonie Castle just three miles from Wemyss. In her discussion of the music manuscript, Evelyn Stell states, referring to the younger Margaret, ‘The poor standard of the tablature suggest that she did not follow the usual course of being sent to a city to be taught by the best masters, but was given lessons at home by someone with less of a musical education’ (Stell, 1999). This fits with the earlier suggestion that by the start of the 17th century the lute and its instruction had become the province of a few aristocratic ladies and in this case that Margaret Leslie, Lady Balgonie was involved. It may also be significant that the manuscript is the earliest source of the tune ‘general Leslys godnight’ presumably named for her father-in-law, the first Earl of Leven, who was appointed General of all the Forces in Scotland on the 9th May 1639.

Whether or not Margaret Leslie provided any musical instruction to the younger Margaret, having been the next-door neighbour to the Wemyss family for some ten years, the younger girl’s history would have been quite familiar to the older woman. In turn, on the death of her second husband and remarriage to the Earl of Wemyss, access to and the background of the music manuscript would present no problem which returns to the question of the signatures. As the daughter of the earl of Rothes, the only title she held in her own right was to be called Lady Margaret Leslie. As the dowager Countess of Buccleuch and from her third marriage Countess of Wemyss, she held those titles through being married to those respective earls and so her ‘signatures’ varied over the years. Often she just signed herself ‘Margaret Leslie’; however there is some evidence that following the last marriage she did sometimes sign her name as ‘Margaret Wemyss’. (Anon, 1879, pp.18 with facsimile signature, 86 and 111).

If the later and more mature hand in the manuscript is that of Margaret Leslie, then possibly, as paper was expensive and any spare space would be used, then writing ‘Wemyss’ rather than ‘Leslie’, and adding ‘Mrs’ to distinguish her signature from the younger woman’s makes sense, especially as one of the main applications of Maistres is cited by the DOST as a woman who wields authority or is the possessor of an estate, which as the guardian of her daughter the countess of Buccleuch and during her daughters minority overseeing that estate, certainly fits the circumstances.

Keith Sanger
22 May 2025

Further Reading

National Records of Scotland (NRS)

  • NRS GD 3/5/417
  • NRS CC20/4/10
  • NRS CC20/4/14
  • NRS OPR453/10/22
  • NRS OPR453/10/44.

 

Leave a comment

Cookie preferences