The Sterling genealogy

THE CADDER LINE 33
resigning his lands of Kirkmichael and Blarnaru, in the lands of
the superior, in favor of William Strevelyn, his son and heir ap-
parent, and Elizabeth Buchanan, his wife.
There is still appended to this procuratory the seal of the
grantor, which bears on a bend engrailed, three buckles. The
crest is a swan's head issuing out of a coronet, being the same as
the original crest of the Earls of Crawford. David, the fifth
Earl, who was created Duke of Montrose in 1488, carried the
same crest on his ducal seal. It might be thought that as the
Keir family carried the plain bend and those of Cadder the bend
engrailed, the latter were cadets of the former. But the mere
fact of engrailing a bend does not invariably establish cadency.
Nesbit says : " Those principal families who have any of these
lines of partition in their arms, their cadets, in my humble opinion,
besides making them crooked by putting them under accidental
forms, engrailed, invecked, waved, etc., should give also some other
additional figure or some eminent alteration — for these accidental
forms alone do neither show the degrees of birth, nor time when
cadets descended of principal houses and are not so serviceable
as the minute differences." Sir David Lindsay's heraldic work,
which was written in the middle of the sixteenth century, gives the
arms of Stirling of Keir with the bend engrailed and those of
Cadder with the bend plain. Nisbet mentions that in the House
of Falahill their Keir arms, with the bend engrailed, were illumi-
nated with those of many others of the barons of Scotland in the
year 1604.
With such variation in the use of engrailing the bend, both
by the Cadder and Keir families, little weight can be attached
to it as an heraldic test of cadency.
On Dec. 27, 1505, William of Strevelyne, Laird of Cadder,
granted a precept for giving possession to William of Hamilton,
in Kincaryll, of the lands of Craigbrey, in the barony of Berna-
bogall and shire of Linlithgow, in the terms of an assignation
of life rent granted by the said William of Strevelyne. One of
the witnesses to this precept is Mr. John Strevelyn, curate of
Cadder.
William Strevelyne died Feb. 11, 1505. He had one son: