| The great family of Dunbar, whose name means "strength on the summit" or "fort on the hill," originally were descended from the Saxon kings of England. For hundreds of years, Dunbar Castle (first mentioned in 835 AD), a sea-girt fortress crowning a precipice in East Lothian, was an impregnable stronghold. After the battle of Bannockburn, King Edward II saved his life by a sixty-mile headlong flight thither, while Mary Queen of Scots found it a convenient retreat on more than one occasion. The members of the House of Dunbar were never far from the center of national affairs, and the Earls of Dunbar figured prominently in almost every struggle within Scotland throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the great families of Scotland sought to dominate the crown and to gain riches from the monarchy. But the House of Dunbar survived when many others failed, and this, then, recounts their exploits through the civil wars of the seventeenth century and the Jacobite intrigues after 1688 and down through Culloden. Included is an index of family names, as well as an account of the direct line of descent of Dunbar of Kilconzie. - Foreign/Ethnic - Scotland - |
