Hegarty’s lists: Jura names in 1625

In 1624–25 a Franciscan brother, Patrick Hegarty, visited the isle of Jura as part of an apostolic mission to the West Highlands, and brought forty-two individuals back to the faith. He listed their names in latinised form in a document which survives in the Vatican. Ronald Black attempts a thorough analysis of the names with the aim of establishing the identity of each individual. To do this he presents a numbered table of the names in their Latin, Gaelic and English forms, summarises the history of Jura landownership from 1334 to 1624, and then discusses each name individually. The names represent about 10% of Jura’s population, concentrated in the south. Black finds that at least 40% of them represent the hereditary professional classes of Gaelic Scotland, those whose heritage was most under threat from the Reformation, the recent Campbell takeover of most of the island, and the Statutes of Iona.