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Authors: David H. Caldwell

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According to the most well-known story, sometime in the seventeenth-century a servant of the MacKenzie tacksman (tenant) of Baile na Cille, known as ‘An Gille Ruadh' (the Red Gillie), spied a young sailor fleeing his ship with a bundle, which turned out to contain the Lewis chessmen. The gillie at first befriended the youth, but then murdered him for the sake of his treasure and buried it for recovery at a later date. That he never managed to do, and his crime was only uncovered when he himself confessed it some time later on the scaffold at Stornoway as he was about to be executed for other misdemeanours.

Needless to say, there is no record of this tale being told prior
to 1831. As a story it no doubt satisfied and amused countless
Lèodhasaich
(natives of Lewis) as it was recounted over the years, but it had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing a belief that somehow the hoard did not belong in Lewis but only got there by accident. The story's origin can be traced to Donald Morrison, known as
An Sgoilear Bàn
, a noted local storyteller. Morrison died in 1834, but left a manuscript of his stories for others to use. It is now preserved in Stornoway Public Library and was fully published in 1975.

Very little is known about Malcolm MacLeod, the hoard's finder. Indeed, the first time his name is actually recorded is in 1863, and none of the nineteenth-century experts who wrote on the hoard seem to have had the opportunity to meet or to discuss his discovery with him. Morrison the storyteller appears to be the source for the hoard being found in the sands at Uig Strand, but, remarkably, the earliest accounts of the hoard give a completely different find-spot.

On 29 June 1831
The Scotsman
newspaper reported that the chessmen had recently been acquired by an Edinburgh dealer, Mr J. A. Forrest (listed in contemporary records as a watchmaker, jeweller and medallist). They had been found some months previously by a ‘peasant of Uig' near the ruins of a nunnery in Uig, known as Taigh nan Cailleachan Dubha (the house of the black women). Ririe, the man who had brought the pieces to Edinburgh, had apparently sold them to Forrest, but not before he had allowed an Edinburgh collector, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, to purchase ten of them. It is these ten, plus an eleventh later acquired by Sharpe from Lewis, that are now in National Museums Scotland. Forrest sold the rest to the British Museum.

Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe [
Fig. 2
] is our source for yet more detailed information on the chessmen's find-spot. According to him, they were found in a vaulted room about six feet (1.83 metres) long. They were partially buried in sand and the floor was covered with ash. The chamber was located near ‘the house of the black women', where tradition affirmed a nunnery once stood. Sharpe also described the chamber as similar to a small subterranean stone building, like an oven. It was at some depth below the surface and some distance from the shore, and was only exposed after a sudden and very considerable inroad by the sea. ‘The peasant' discoverer had to break into this structure to find the hoard.

2. CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE
(Source: The Walter Scott Digital Archive, Edinburgh University Library)

Sharpe is a particularly important witness since he dealt directly with Roderick Ririe. Indeed, Ririe may have been ‘the gentleman from Stornoway' that, according to a late nineteenth century source, dug out pieces which were not recovered by Malcolm MacLeod himself. So where was this underground chamber? The answer is very easy, since its location can be identified by its proximity to the alleged nunnery, at Mèalasta on the west coast of Lewis, still within the Parish of Uig but about six miles south of Uig Strand [
Fig. 3
]. There are no traces now of any structure that could be identified as a nunnery, and
indeed this appears to be a red herring. There are no documentary sources suggesting that there was a nunnery here in medieval times, only the opinion of the minister of Uig, writing in the 1790s, that its remains could be identified.

The underground chamber is much more plausible. From the descriptions supplied by Sharpe it might be identified as a souterrain, an underground structure dating to the Iron Age or Early Medieval Period, perhaps used for storage. These are fairly widespread throughout Scotland, and from other sources one is known to have existed at Mèalasta. It was described in 1870 as consisting of a gallery terminating in a bee-hive chamber, but by that time its stones had been removed for building purposes. Intriguingly, a circular stone chamber, about two metres in diameter and accessed by a passageway, lies under the medieval house at Jarlshof in Shetland, a complex site with occupation extending back to the Bronze Age. The excavators could not be sure of its age, but the wind-blown sand that accumulated within it contained a slate inscribed with a Viking age interlace pattern.
*

Whereas the sand dunes at Uig Strand now appear a desolate and secluded spot, Mèalasta has evidently been an important local settlement with relatively good soil and access from the sea. There is the site of a medieval church with a burial ground and, adjacent to the spot marked on Ordnance Survey maps as the site of the nunnery, the sea is weathering out midden deposits from which a bronze finger ring was recovered a number of years ago and awarded as Treasure Trove to Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway. The ring is engraved with crosses and dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century.

All this suggests that Mèalasta is to be preferred to the sands of Uig Strand as the hoard's find-spot. However, there is one further source that backs this up. When the Ordnance Survey
mapped the Parish of Uig in 1852-53 for the first time, they noted in their ‘Name Book' that chessmen, which were sold to ‘a society of antiquaries in Edinburgh', were found in the ruins of a nunnery about seventy years previously. Nothing then remained of it but the site. Not only does this appear to verify the information supplied through Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, it also raises the interesting possibility that some or all of the chessmen could originally have been discovered in the 1780s. It is not beyond the bounds of likelihood that pieces from the hoard could have remained in a local house or barn for fifty years, their value and interest unappreciated until a travelling merchant – Roderick Ririe even? – saw them and spotted a chance to make some money. Might it even be the case that the story of the nunnery was created on the back of the discovery of the chessmen? That, of course, is speculation, but Mèalasta may yet have a lot to tell us.

3. MÈALASTA
(Source: © Stuart Campbell)

*
J. R. C. Hamilton:
Excavations at Jarlshof, Shetland
(Edinburgh: HMSO, 1956), p. 76 and pl. XIIIb.

The Contents of the Hoard

R
ODERICK Ririe brought 93 ivory pieces to Edinburgh in 1831 [
Figs 4.1-63
]. These included a buckle, decorated with foliage designs, that may have fastened a leather or textile bag containing the rest of the hoard. While ivory can survive well in the ground over hundreds of years, it takes very special circumstances, normally permanent water-logging, for cloth or leather to remain intact for any length of time. There are also 14 plain disks, about 55 to 60 millimetres in diameter, which are clearly men for playing a board game. The remaining 78 pieces can readily be identified as chessmen, including kings, queens, bishops, knights, warders (equivalent to rooks today) and pawns. All but the pawns are figurative, that is modelled in considerable detail as humans with appropriate clothing and equipment. These face-pieces vary in height from 70 to 103 millimetres, and the pawns from 40 to 59 millimetres. While the detailing of the face-pieces is realistic, they are not in true human proportions but have comparatively large heads and clothing to the ground to create broad steady bases for ease of play.

The most economical explanation for this group of 78 is that they represent the remains of four chess sets, each, then as now, containing two sides with a king, a queen, two bishops, two knights, two warders/rooks and eight pawns. In that case
the missing pieces are a knight, four warders and 44 pawns. Perhaps they were hidden away with the rest, but were too fragmentary to be recovered. Those that were recovered vary considerably from near perfect to ones which are cracked and have bits missing. Despite early reports that some bore traces of staining, presumably so that a red side could be distinguished from a white side, scientific analyses in recent times have so far failed to identify any substance that could have been used to colour them. It would be possible, however, to group them into four sets on the basis of size alone. Altogether, with the missing pieces and some more tables-men, the hoard could have weighed as much as 1.5 kilograms and have occupied a box or bag about 200 by 350 by 250 millimetres.

4.1-4.63 THE LEWIS HOARD OF GAMING PIECES
(Source:
Mediaeval Archaeology
[2006], 53, 155-203)

NOTE ON
FIGS 4.1-4.63

The captions to the black and white single images that follow take this form:

 

•
The piece type (e.g. King, Queen, Bishop, etc.)

•
The piece number (pieces 19-29 in National Museums Scotland)

•
The height (in millimetres)

•
The group (see the chapter ‘Analysing the Chessmen') – e.g. A-E, X – and the set number (1-4)

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