"of the males of all and haill the landis whilk are conteint in ane bond made by umquhile Johne Armistrang, my father, to umquhile Robert, Lord Maxwell, gudshore to the said Johne, now Lord Maxwell." It would therefore appear, that the bond of manrent, granted by John Armstrong, had been the price of his release from the feudal penalty arising from his having neglected to procure a regular investiture from his superior. As Johne only touched the pen, it appears that he could not write.

Christopher Armstrong, above mentioned, is the person alluded to in the conclusion of the ballad-" God be with thee, Kirsty, my son." He was the father, or grandfather, of William Armstrong, called Christie's Will, a renowned freebooter, some of whose exploits the reader will find recorded in another volume of this work.

Mr Ellis of Otterbourne has kindly pointed out the following instance of the ferocity of the Armstrongs, which occurs in the confession of one John Weir, a prisoner in the tolbooth of Edinburgh, under sentence of death, in 1700: "In May, 1700, John Weire went to Grandee Knows, (near Haltwhistle, in Northumberland,) to the mother of the four brethren the Armstrongs, which Armstrongs, and the aforesaid Burley, did cut the tongue and ear out of William Turner, for informing that they were bad persons, which Turner wrote with his blood that they had used him so."—Weire also mentions one Thomas Armstrong, called Luck i' the Bagg, who lived in Cumberland. The extent of their depredations in horse-stealing seems to have been astonishing.