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Elliot History

With early written records concerned mostly with which family was owning which huge land area or marrying with which other nobility, the medieval history of most Scottish people is unaccounted for. Nonetheless it is surprising that when the Eliotts were apparently first written of in the late fifteenth century they were already an established clan with a chief. The missing information was perhaps among the ashes of the old Stobs castle, which burned in 1712.

The early history of the Eliotts, Ellots before the insertion of the ‘i’ in the 1650s, survived by verbal tradition. In the time of Robert the Bruce, the Ellots, who had lived in the north at the foot of Glenshie, uprooted and moved to Teviotdale in the Borders. This unusual move was undertaken in order to support and protect Bruce’s illegitimate son Robert, who had become the new Lord of Liddesdale. The previous Lord, William de Soulis, was serving life imprisonment for treason.

For certain, Robert Ellot of Redheugh was the clan’s tenth chief in 1476, and the thirteenth chief, Robert, died at Flodden with James IV in 1513. In 1565, Scott of Buccleuch executed four of his Ellot neighbours for cattle rustling.

Sir Gilbert Elliot of Stobs became Baronet of Nova Scotia in 1666 and for a time, until 1932, the chiefs lived in America.

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