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Variants Newland, Newlands. A locality name meaning 'of
Newland', from parishes found in Counties Worcestershire and
Gloucestershire. This name is of English descent and is found in many
ancient manuscripts in the above country. Examples of such are a Roger de la
Neulonde, County Cambridgeshire, who was recorded in the 'Hundred Rolls',
England, in the year 1273 and a Richard le Neulond, County Cambridgeshire,
was also recorded in the same year in this ancient document. Names were
recorded in these ancient documents to make it easier for their overlords to
collect taxes and to keep records of the population at any given time. When
the overlords acquired land by either force or gifts from their rulers, they
created charters of ownership for themselves and their vassals. Other
examples of this name were found in the persons of a John Newlande and Grace
Sampson who were granted a marriage license, in London, in the year 1573 and
a William Newland and Mary Spratt were married in Saint James, Clerkenwell,
in the year 1670.
Our thanks to
Willy Newlands for sending this
into us.
The chief of the Newlands
family appears early in Scottish records in 1469 when Jasper Newlands of
that Ilk was involved in a court case at Penpont, Dumfriesshire, where he
was in dispute with Lord Carlisle. The trial concerned water rights in
Nithsdale, at Drumcow, and Newlands was ordered to “cease from further
vexation”. The dispute continued for many years, but Newlands seems to have
avoided any further court appearances.
Less fortunate was Walter
Newlands of that Ilk, whose “slaughter” by Charles Lowrie was recorded by
the Privy Council in 1526.
There were various baronies
bearing the name of Newlands, not only in Dumfriesshire and Peeblesshire,
but in Stirlingshire and also Kincardine, where the extensive barony was
held by the church and valued at almost a fifth of all the church property
in the sheriffdom. None of these estates was in the ownership of the family
beyond medieval times and the Name was scattered in many parts of Scotland,
from the Borders to the northern isles, with strongholds in the North-east,
Glasgow and the Lothians. Duncan Newlands was a bailie of Linlithgow in 1493
and Janetta Newlands was heir to lands in the barony of Monkland in 1675.
Similar entries appear through the centuries.
From the 1700s onwards, the
family was typical of many in Scotland, sending men in uniform and emigrants
to all parts of the Empire, often in the service of the East India Company
or the Hudson’s Bay Company. These included a Lieutenant Governor in Canada,
an Australian MP who surveyed a route for a transcontinental railway,
pioneers in South Africa, civil servants in Mauritius, a prominent Senator
in the United States who married the heiress to a silver-mine fortune and
annexed Hawaii, numerous farmers in New Zealand, a merchant dynasty in
Portugal, and the master of a clipper ship, the Champion of the Seas, who
set the unbroken record for the greatest distance sailed by a clipper in one
day. In the UK, there were leading civil engineers, agricultural innovators
and, more recently, an eminent professor of divinity at Glasgow and
Cambridge, the Rev. Dr. George Newlands, whose wife Elizabeth has written a
three-volume book about the history of the family in Banffshire and beyond.
The clan tartan was
re-designed in the 1980s by Jamie Scarlett, OBE, and there are two family
pipe tunes -- The Road to Lauriston Castle, composed by Pipe Major Garth
Newlands, British Columbia, and The Lady Lauriston, by Pipe Major Bert
Baron, BEM.
In 1985, William and Dorothy
Newlands of Lauriston came into their Aberdeenshire barony and they have
since rebuilt Lauriston Castle at St.Cyrus, which had fallen into disrepair
after being requisitioned as an RAF barracks during World War II, and also
restored its extensive ravine gardens. The castle was held at one time as a
royal stronghold, taken and strengthened by the Plantaganet King Edward III
in 1336. The name of the barony was changed to Miltonhaven in 1695 under a
burgh charter from King William III and it was granted freeport status, but
the little harbour was swept away in a great storm in 1795, leaving
Lauriston to be known as the “Drown’d Barony”. The burgh was absorbed by the
county in the 1970s.
Travel writer Willy Newlands
was formerly on the staff of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, and Dorothy is
a bid writer and director of Boston Morgan, based in the City of London. She
is
Late Collector of the
Wrights in Glasgow (2016) and a
liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers in London.
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