A
HISTORY
OF THE
COUNTY OF RENFREW
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES.
BY
WILLIAM M METCALFE, D.D.
With a Map of the County.
PAISLEY: ALEXANDER GARDNER,
publisher by appointment to the late Queen Victoria,
1905.
IN the following pages I have tried to tell the history of the County of Renfrew in connection with the history of the country.
Use has been made of Crawfurd's History of the Shire and of the editions of it published by Semple and Robertson; but the contents of the volume and the references placed at the foot of the pages, will chew that the lines on which the present history has been written are different from those followed by Crawfurd, and that other sources, printed and unprinted, have been used. My thanks are due to my brethren of the Presbytery of Paisley for the free use they have allowed me of their invaluable Records, and to those of the ministers and gentlemen in the shire who have so readily favoured me with information respecting their various parishes.
I have also to express my sincere thanks to Colonel King, the Chairman of the County Council, for permission to snake use of the armorial bearings of the County; to James Caldwell, Esq., of Craigielea, for the use of the first volume of the Craigends Papers, which unfortunately reached me too late to be used in the body of the work, but from which extracts are given in the Appendix ; to the Rev. Walter Macleod, Edinburgh, for reporting on the two Paisley Regality Books in the Register House; to the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, for permission to reproduce the Ordnance Survey Map of the County; and to the Director General of the Ordnance Survey.
The obligations I am under to my friend the Rev. R. D. MacKenzie, B.D., minister of the parish of Kilbarchan, and author of an excellent history of that parish, are very great, both for the care with which he has read the proofs and for the many and valuable suggestions he has given me.
I can scarcely hope that I have escaped falling into error. In this respect those who have experience of the difficulty of attaining to absolute accuracy in a work where almost every page bristles with names and dates, will, I am sure, be my most lenient censors.
As a rule, I have adopted the spelling of the names of individuals and places which I found in the authorities before me at the time of writing. Hence a name is sometimes spelled in different ways on the same page. The plan has its drawbacks, but it has also its advantages.
W. M. M.
PAISLEY, November, 1905.