Macfie

In modern Gaelic this name is written as ‘Mac a’ Phi’. It is usually rendered in English, Macfie or Macphee or Macafie. The name appears to be derived from ‘MacDhuibhshith’, meaning ‘son of the dark fairy’. The origin of this name has been lost in the mists of time. In many countries the remnants of the original bearers of the name have been conferred with mystic powers. Tradition asserts that the Macfies are descended from a seal-woman who had been prevented from returning to the sea. In 1164 Duibhshith was known to have been ‘ferleighinn’, or ‘reader’, at Iona when Malcolm IV was king. The Macphees of Colonsay were the hereditary keepers of the records of Man and the Isles. There is little or no trace of these records, which may have been kept at Tynwald, still the seat of the Manx Parliament. One charter which does exist is evidence of the fact that the Lords of the Isles did conduct their business in the ancient Celtic tongue as well as in clerical Latin. There is a tradition that one of the chiefs of Colonsay fought and overcame Sir Gile de Argentine at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. He would probably have come to the battle with the Lord of the Isles. The Macphees continued to be loyal to the Macdonalds even after the Hebrides were ceded to Scotland in 1494 by the king of Denmark on the marriage of his daughter, Princess Margaret, to James III. This established the legal claim of the Scots Crown to control of the island kingdoms, a policy which was to be ruthlessly enforced by James IV. In 1615 Malcolm Macphee of Colonsay joined Sir James Macdonald, chief of the Macdonalds, in the southern islands in his rebellion against the Earl of Argyll. Macphee and eighteen other leading conspirators were betrayed to the Campbells and were forced to sign the Statutes of Iona, abandoning the ancient Lordship of the Isles. (Colonsay was later murdered in 1623 while ignominiously hiding under piles of seaweed.) The Macphees were dispossessed, and some followed the Macdonalds, but most others went to the mainland where they found shelter in Lochaber. Many Macphees are believed to have followed Cameron of Lochiel at the ill-fated Battle of Culloden in 1746. In the middle of the nineteenth century Ewan Macphee became famous as the last Scottish outlaw, when he settled with his family on Eilean Mhic Phee in Loch Quoich. He recognised no law and was an inveterate sheep stealer. Macfie of Dreghorn matriculated arms in the Lyon register in 1864. He was a member of a powerful merchant family with considerable interests in the sugar-refining industry. The company was eventually to be taken over by the present sugar giants, Tate & Lyle. Sadly, many of the clan were so destitute that they could make no permanent home, and today the name is most closely associated with the wandering tin-smiths known as ‘tinkers’. There is now an active Macfie Society world-wide and the Lord Lyon has recognised this by granting a commission for the appointment of a clan commander.