In 1778 the Court of Session ruled by eight votes to four that a man named Joseph Knight could not be held as property in Scotland. The man he had sued was called Wedderburn, and that case remains the most consequential thing this surname is attached to.
The name itself begins a long way from that courtroom, on a Berwickshire burn.
What Does Wedderburn Mean?
The wether burn: the stream where the castrated rams were pastured. The Oxford-backed surname dictionaries call Wedderburn a Scottish habitational name from lands of that name in Berwickshire, and the Dictionaries of the Scots Language give wedder as the Scots form of English wether, "a castrated male sheep". Burn is Scots for a stream, so the name describes a piece of grazing; Weatherburn is the same word modernized. The earliest bearer usually cited is Wautier de Wederburn, who gave homage to Edward I in 1296.
Who Ended Up With the Berwickshire Lands?
Not the Wedderburns. Around 1413 the superiority of the barony went to Sir David of Home by grant of the Earl of Douglas, and by 1550 the Homes held it outright, marked by a sasine to David Home after his brother died at Pinkie, as our history of the Homes of Berwickshire describes.
The castle carrying the name was built for a Home: Wedderburn Castle near Duns, built between 1771 and 1775 by Robert and James Adam. Anyone visiting expecting a Wedderburn seat is looking at the house of the family that displaced them, a common outcome where baronies like Bonkyl changed hands repeatedly.
How Did the Name Become a Dundee Name?
By moving into burgh government and staying there. By about 1400 four related households were established at Dundee and Kingennie, the most prominent taking its designation from Blackness, and Wedderburns held the clerkship of Dundee for generations, alongside burgh names like the Thoms family.
Who Wrote the Gude and Godlie Ballatis?
Three brothers, sons of a Dundee merchant, working around 1540.
James, born about 1495, wrote two plays staged at the Dundee Playfield in 1539 and 1540; neither survives, and heresy charges drove him to France, where he died in 1553. John, born about 1500, studied at St Andrews under the reformer Patrick Hamilton, lost his goods to a heresy charge and fled to Wittenberg about 1540, returning in 1542 to work with the printer John Scott and dying in English exile in 1556. Robert, born about 1510, became vicar of Dundee in 1546 and is usually credited with The Complaynt of Scotland of 1549, an attribution the National Library of Scotland supports without settling it.
What the three made were sacred parodies: Protestant words set to tunes everyone already knew, aimed at "sinne and harlotrie". The only surviving early edition is the 1567 Ane Compendious Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs, and it worked as propaganda for the Scottish Reformation because it was singable. The family later produced the opposite: James Wedderburn, born in Dundee in 1585, helped Archbishop Laud with the Scottish liturgy, became Bishop of Dunblane in 1636 and was deposed in 1638 for it.
Who Was the Lord Chancellor?
Alexander Wedderburn, 1st Earl of Rosslyn, born at Chesterhall near Dunbar on 3 February 1733, son of a Court of Session judge. He entered Edinburgh University at fourteen, was called to the English bar in 1757 and hired elocution coaches to sand down his Scottish accent, which tells you what he intended. Americans meet him on 29 January 1774, when he stood before the Privy Council in the Cockpit at Whitehall and delivered an hour of abuse at Benjamin Franklin over the Hutchinson letters. Franklin stood silent throughout and never forgot it. He became attorney general in 1778, Lord Loughborough in 1780, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain from 1793 to 1801 and Earl of Rosslyn in April 1801. George III is reported to have said his death in 1805 removed "the greatest knave in the Kingdom".
What Was the Family Doing in Jamaica?
Owning sugar estates and the people forced to work them, and the record is public. Sir John, 5th Baronet of Blackness, joined the rising of 1745 and was executed for treason in 1746, the baronetcy forfeited. Two sons, John and James, sailed for Jamaica in 1747 and moved from posing as medical practitioners into land and enslaved labor.
John, born 1729, had watched his father hanged, drawn and quartered before he fled. In Jamaica he held around 17,000 acres and ranked among the island's largest landowners. He bought an enslaved boy at auction in 1762, named him Joseph Knight, and returned in 1769 to buy Ballindean; our account of Culloden and its aftermath covers the forfeitures that sent men like him abroad. James, born 28 August 1739, built his own sugar fortune, fathered children by enslaved women, returned in 1773 and took Inveresk Lodge and the surname Colvile. His will made no provision for his Jamaican children.
How Did Joseph Knight Win?
By walking out, being arrested, and refusing to stop appealing. Knight was born in Guinea and taken to Jamaica as a boy. Brought to Scotland in 1769, he was baptized and married Ann Thompson, a servant in the household. When Wedderburn would not let the couple live together, Knight left; Wedderburn had him arrested, and the case opened at Perth in 1774.
The sheriff, John Swinton, found for Knight in terms that left little room: "the state of slavery is not recognised by the laws of this kingdom, and is inconsistent with the principles thereof." Wedderburn appealed, and the Court of Session heard the case across 1777 and 1778 with Lord Kames among the twelve judges. The Lord Advocate, Henry Dundas, appeared on Knight's side, worth holding beside what Dundas did to the abolition motion in 1792. The court held eight to four that "the dominion assumed over this Negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country."
Who Was Robert Wedderburn?
James Wedderburn's son, and one of the most striking radicals in Britain. He was born at Kingston, Jamaica, about 1762, son of Rosanna, an enslaved woman in James Wedderburn's house, and of Wedderburn himself. His father stipulated that the child be born free and registered him as such, then sold Rosanna back to her previous enslaver while she was five months pregnant. Robert was raised by his grandmother, known as Talkee Amy.
He joined the Royal Navy at sixteen to get away, reached Britain at seventeen and trained as a tailor in St Giles. He turned Methodist in 1786, then Unitarian, opening his own chapel on Hopkins Street in Soho. A follower of Thomas Spence, he led the Spencean Society from 1817, and in 1820 was convicted of blasphemy for the debates he ran there.
In 1824 he published The Horrors of Slavery, which named his father and described visiting the Scottish estate to be given nothing but a draught of small beer and a cracked sixpence. His death is not firmly dated: English civil registration began only in 1837, and a Robert Wedderborn was buried at Bethnal Green on 4 January 1835, aged 72. Our history of the Gladstone name and its Demerara fortune covers this ground from the other side of the ledger.
Is There a Clan Wedderburn?
Clan literature treats Wedderburn as a Lowland family and reckons the chiefship to lie with the Scrymgeour-Wedderburns, Earls of Dundee, whose chiefly standing is of Scrymgeour rather than Wedderburn; our history of the Scrymgeours sets out that line. The scale is modest: 120 Wedderburns in Scotland in 1901, ranked 2,926th.
How Do You Trace a Wedderburn Line?
- Search Wedderburn, Weatherburn, Wederburn and Wedderburne together, adding Colvile after 1774.
- Work Angus and Dundee before Berwickshire; the Border lands were gone by the mid-sixteenth century.
- Use burgh and guild registers as well as parish books, since a family of burgh clerks left traces baptisms will not show.
- If your line touches Jamaica, search estate papers too, and expect the enslaved side to appear under the owner's surname.
- Anchor everything on a statutory certificate, using our introduction to ScotlandsPeople.
Own a Piece of Wedderburn Heritage
This is a surname with a great deal under it, some admirable and some not, and both halves belong to the same word. A woven blanket, a mug, a garden flag, an engraved charcuterie board and a coaster set carry the family crest against tartan. No pattern was assigned to the Wedderburns of Berwickshire or Dundee, so the cloth is a design choice, as our note on tartan convention explains.
The Wedderburn Mug, Crest on Tartan
Frequently Asked Questions About the Wedderburn Name
What does Wedderburn mean?
The wether burn, the stream where wethers were grazed, from lands of that name in Berwickshire.
Was the Wedderburn family involved in slavery?
Yes. John and James Wedderburn, sons of the executed 5th Baronet of Blackness, built fortunes on Jamaican sugar estates worked by enslaved people from 1747 onward. John was the defendant in Knight v. Wedderburn; James was the father of the abolitionist Robert Wedderburn.
What was Knight v. Wedderburn?
The 1778 Court of Session case in which Joseph Knight established that slavery could not be supported under Scots law.
Sources and Further Reading
- Geneanet: Wedderburn — the derivation.
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language: wedder — the sheep word.
- Wedderburn Castle — the Home superiority and the Adam house.
- Clan Wedderburn — 1296, Blackness and the chiefship question.
- The Gude and Godlie Ballatis — the 1567 edition.
- James Wedderburn, poet — the Playfield plays.
- John Wedderburn, poet — Wittenberg, Scott's press.
- Robert Wedderburn, vicar of Dundee — The Complaynt.
- James Wedderburn, Bishop of Dunblane — Laud and the 1638 deposition.
- Alexander Wedderburn, Earl of Rosslyn — the Cockpit and the chancellorship.
- John Wedderburn of Ballindean — Jamaica and Joseph Knight.
- Joseph Knight — the 1778 judgment quoted here.
- James Wedderburn-Colville — Inveresk, the will.
- Robert Wedderburn, radical — Rosanna and The Horrors of Slavery.
- Wedderburn in the 1901 census — 120 bearers, ranked 2,926th.
- ScotlandsPeople — where the Angus registers and testaments are read.
A sheep pasture on a Berwickshire burn produced hymn-writers, a Lord Chancellor, a Jamaican planter and the case that ended slavery's standing in Scots law. The Wedderburn designs are here.