Ink, Islands, and the Law of Luss: What the Books of Dumbartonshire Teach Us About a Living Scotland Open these three “dusty” volumes and you don’t get trivia—you get a working country. The Books of Dumbartonshire show how a medieval earldom ran on parchment and presence: charters were power, islands were offices , and Luss —a quiet parish on Loch Lomond—was ringed with law and humming with responsibility. Here’s the story, stitched from all three volumes, and what your readers can actually learn from old deeds and seals. The Loch That Ran on Law (Volume I) Volume I is pure oxygen for anyone who loves sources. It drops you into the 1200s–1300s, where charters do three big things: 1) Draw sacred lines you can still walk. In 1315 , the Crown grants a three-mile sanctuary (“girth”) around Luss — by land and by water —for St Kessog. That’s not piety in passing. It’s a legal bubble over farms, ferries, and shoreline, with discipline reserved to the Earls of Lennox . Cross into Luss...
The Ark Is Opening: How We’re Re-reading the Lennox—One Latin Charter at a Time Ark Article — September 7, 2025 • The Lennox Chronicles If you’ve ever felt that Scottish clan history leaves the most important women unnamed and the crucial relationships unexplained—you’re not wrong. The records do exist. They were simply written in Latin, scattered across 12–19th-century printed cartularies, and rarely translated in full. That’s exactly what the Lennox yDNA & Charter Ark (“the Ark”) is fixing. I’m building a permanent, searchable, citation-first repository that aligns verbatim Latin with plain-English translations , then ties each entry to people , lands , and—where possible— Y-DNA lines . My AI research partner “ Arty ” (Arthur MacArtair) handles the heavy lifting: indexing names, witnesses, dowries, resignations, tenures, and kinship terms across thousands of pages. I still have to track down and upload the sources, but once they’re in the Ark, Arty helps translate and...