Clan Turnbull

The Legend of the Name

No Scottish clan has a more specific or dramatic origin legend than the Turnbulls. The story, preserved in Border tradition and recorded by multiple early chroniclers, runs as follows: one day in the early 14th century — during the reign of Robert the Bruce, and traditionally dated to around 1316 — the king was hunting in the forests of Stirling or the Borders when a wild bull broke from cover and charged directly at him. A man named Rule, or possibly a man whose name would become Turnbull, seized the bull by the horns and threw it to the ground, saving the king from almost certain death.

In gratitude, Robert I granted the man lands in Roxburghshire and, more durably, a new surname: "Turnbull," for the deed of turning the bull. The motto "I saved the king" — Ikept the king in some versions — records the event with a directness that is almost startling among the typically Latin or French mottos of Scottish heraldry. It is the only Scottish clan motto that makes a specific historical claim in the first person.

Historians have treated the legend with appropriate skepticism — the surname itself may have older origins, possibly from a personal name or from a term describing someone who managed bulls in the management of agricultural land. The name "Turnbull" does appear in English records before the period of the Bruce legend, which complicates the story. But the legend took hold with extraordinary tenacity, and by the 16th century the Turnbulls were among the best-known names on the Anglo-Scottish Border — associated not with gentle cattle management but with ferocious raiding and a fearsome reputation.

Rule Water and Bedrule: The Turnbull Heartland

The Rule Water is a tributary of the Teviot, itself a tributary of the Tweed, and flows for about fifteen miles through the eastern Borders of Roxburghshire. It is a beautiful and relatively remote valley — the hills rise steeply on either side, the bottom is fertile meadow, and the whole landscape has the feel of a place that has been shaped by farming and grazing for many generations. The village of Bedrule stands near the head of the valley, where the Rule Water curves through a gap in the hills.

Bedrule was the principal Turnbull seat, and the family spread across Rule Water and the adjacent valleys of Teviotdale throughout the medieval period. At the height of their power in the 15th and early 16th centuries, the Turnbulls were one of the most numerous and feared families in the eastern Borders — a surname that could muster hundreds of fighting men in response to a call to arms, or to a quarrel, or to the opportunity for a profitable raid into England or against a neighbouring family.

The Borders landscape through which the Turnbulls ranged has changed less than almost any other part of Scotland. The great abbeys of Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, and Dryburgh still stand — or stand in magnificent ruin — within a few miles of Rule Water. The hills that the Turnbull riders knew are still sheep country, the farms still operate on much the same land, and the River Teviot still flows broad and cold past Hawick and down to its confluence with the Tweed at Kelso.

The Border Reiving Tradition

The Turnbulls were one of the principal riding families of Teviotdale — that is, they were Border reivers: practitioners of the organised cattle-raiding, kidnapping, and protection racket that defined Border culture from the late 14th century to the early 17th. The Borders was a war zone for three centuries: the repeated invasions of Edward I and his successors, the counter-raids of Scottish armies, and the endemic local violence created a culture in which raiding was not merely criminality but a way of life, a source of income, and a mark of status.

Turnbull men appear repeatedly in the records of Border law enforcement — or rather, in the records of Border law failure. The March Warden courts, set up by the governments of Scotland and England to manage cross-border disputes, accumulated enormous files of Turnbull complaints, pledges, and prosecutions throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. The 1530 muster roll of the Scottish West and Middle Marches lists hundreds of Turnbull men available for military service — a remarkable demonstration of the family's numerical strength in the region.

The family's most dramatic moment in the reiving tradition came in 1510, when James IV of Scotland — frustrated by the chronic disorder of the Borders — led a judicial expedition into Teviotdale to enforce order. The Turnbulls were among the most prominent families brought to account. A famous submission took place near Jedburgh, when two or three hundred Turnbull men appeared before the king in their shirts, with ropes around their necks, bearing the heads of cattle they had slaughtered as symbols of submission, to beg the king's pardon for their depredations. The theatrical nature of this submission — the ropes, the heads, the numbers — speaks to the complexity of Border culture, where defiance and deference existed in the same gesture.

The Battle of Flodden, 1513

Three years after the great submission at Jedburgh, many of the same Turnbull men were in the Scottish army that marched to meet the English at Flodden on 9 September 1513. Flodden was one of the most catastrophic defeats in Scottish military history: James IV was killed, along with perhaps 10,000 Scottish soldiers including a large proportion of the Border men who had mustered under the standard of Teviotdale.

The Turnbull losses at Flodden were severe. The family had provided a significant contingent to the Scottish host, and the deaths at Flodden — coming so close after the judicial submission of 1510 — represented a devastating blow to the family's numbers and to the strength of Teviotdale reiving culture generally. The Border families never fully recovered the numerical and military weight they had before Flodden.

The End of the Reiving Age

The Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, transformed the Border situation overnight. The "frontier" ceased to exist in political terms, and the new British Crown moved quickly and ruthlessly to pacify the Borders. The reiving families — the Armstrongs, Elliots, Scotts, Kerrs, Turnbulls, Maxwells, and dozens of others — were targeted by joint commissions of English and Scottish officers. Many were hanged; others were transported to Ireland as Plantation settlers; others simply dispersed into the wider population.

The Turnbulls, like other major reiving families, lost their communal identity as a raiding group after 1603. Some individual Turnbull families maintained their presence in Rule Water; others dispersed through the Borders and into the Scottish lowlands. The family name survived in large numbers, but the clan as a political and military entity ceased to operate after the pacification of the Borders.

Famous Members of Clan Turnbull

• Rule (fl. c.1316) — The legendary ancestor who saved Robert the Bruce from a charging bull and received the surname Turnbull and lands in Roxburghshire. Whether historical or legendary, he gave the family its most distinctive identity.
• William Turnbull (c.1400–1454) — Bishop of Glasgow from 1447 and founder of the University of Glasgow in 1451 — the second-oldest university in Scotland and the fourth-oldest in the English-speaking world. His papal bull of 1451 established the institution that still flourishes in Glasgow's West End. Turnbull's portrait hangs in the university's Randolph Hall.
• George Turnbull (1698–1748) — Philosopher and educationalist, a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740) influenced later 18th-century moral philosophy, and his Treatise on Ancient Painting (1740) was a pioneering work of art history and aesthetics.
• Peter Turnbull (19th century) — One of the many Turnbulls who emigrated to North America and contributed to the agricultural and commercial development of Upper Canada and the American Midwest.
• Agnes Turnbull (1888–1982) — American novelist, born in New Alexandria, Pennsylvania, to a family of Scottish descent. She wrote warmly of her Scots-Irish Presbyterian heritage and produced over twenty novels about small-town American life, drawing explicitly on the cultural inheritance of her Border ancestors.

William Turnbull and the University of Glasgow

Of all the Turnbull legacy in Scottish history, none is more lasting than the founding of the University of Glasgow by Bishop William Turnbull in 1451. Turnbull was a churchman of considerable ability who had studied at St Andrews and at the University of Cologne before rising to become Bishop of Glasgow. His petition to Pope Nicholas V for a papal bull establishing a university in Glasgow was granted on 7 January 1451, and the document — the founding charter of one of the world's great universities — still survives.

The University of Glasgow today has over 30,000 students, a global research reputation, and a magnificent Victorian Gothic campus in the West End of Glasgow. Its founding by a man from the most feared Border reiving family in Scotland is one of those delicious ironies of history: the name Turnbull, associated for two centuries with raiding and violence, gave Scotland one of its greatest intellectual institutions.

The Turnbull Diaspora

The Turnbull name spread through the Scottish diaspora in two main waves. The first, in the early 17th century, was the forced dispersal of Border families after the Union of the Crowns — many Turnbulls were among the "planted" families sent to Ulster, particularly to Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone. Their descendants subsequently emigrated to North America, settling across the Appalachian region and into the American South.

The second wave was the voluntary emigration of the 18th and 19th centuries, when Roxburghshire and the eastern Borders sent families to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as agricultural and commercial emigrants. Ontario, New South Wales, and Otago all have significant Turnbull communities descended from these later emigrants.

In the United States, the Turnbull name is particularly associated with the Scots-Irish communities of Virginia, North Carolina, and Appalachia — families who trace their origins back through Ulster to the Borders. The combination of the distinctive surname and the even more distinctive motto "I saved the king" makes Turnbull ancestry one of the more immediately recognisable in Scottish-American genealogical research.

Researching Turnbull Ancestry

For Turnbull research, the geographic heartland is Roxburghshire — specifically the Rule Water valley and the broader Teviotdale area. Old Parish Registers for parishes including Bedrule, Roberton, Teviothead, Hawick, and Jedburgh are the starting point. ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk holds these records, searchable from roughly 1600 to 1855.

For the reiving period (roughly 1350–1600), the primary sources are the Border Papers — state papers relating to the Anglo-Scottish border, available in printed form through the Scottish Record Society and partly digitised. The Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, available through the National Records of Scotland, contains many references to Turnbull family members in the context of Border law enforcement and disputes.

The Hawick Archaeological Society and the Hawick Museum hold significant collections of local material relating to Teviotdale families. The Scottish Borders Archive and Local History Centre in Selkirk holds estate papers, church records, and local court records that can push family research back into the 16th century.

For American families of Turnbull descent, the critical archival bridge is the Ulster connection. PRONI in Belfast holds Presbyterian church registers and estate papers for the Plantation counties. The Griffith's Valuation (1847–1864) identifies surviving Turnbull families in Ireland. The Scotch-Irish Society of the United States of America publishes genealogical material that can help trace lines from Appalachia back through Ulster to the Scottish Borders.

Y-chromosome DNA testing has been used to trace Turnbull paternal lines with some success. The relative rarity of the name — it is distinctive enough to be useful genealogically — means that DNA matches within the surname project have a higher probability of indicating genuine genealogical connection than is the case with very common surnames.