Gray History

The surname is originally French, being first borne by Fulbert, Great Chamberlain of Rover, Duke of Normandy, who granted him the castle and lands of Croy or Gray in Picardy which he thereafter assumed as the family surname. His daughter, Arlotta, is said to have been the mother of William the Conqueror. In England several families from this source were raised to high rank, and spelt their name "Grey". From the Dukes of Suffolk came the amiable and accomplished Lady Jane Grey, who was an innocent victim of the ambitions of her father. She was proclaimed Queen of England and reigned for nine days in 1553, but she perished on the block in 1554. Like many others, the Grays swore fealty to Edward I of England in the Ragman Roll of 1296, but they were soon following Robert the Bruce on the long fight for Scottish independence. Sir Andrew Gray was rewarded with several grants of land, including Longorgen in Perthshire for his services to the crown. Patrick Gray of Buttergask, the fifth Lord Gray, was one of the first promoters of the Reformation in Scotland.

Andrew, eighth Lord Gray, resigned his honours to Charles I and obtained a new patent in favour, after himself, of his daughter Ann who had married William Gray, younger of Pittendrum who was a staunch royalist. When he was killed in 1660, the title passed to the Earls of Moray, but on the death in 1895 of the fourteenth Earl of Moray and eighteenth Lord Gray, the title passed to his niece, Eveleen, Baroness Gray in her own right. The present Lord Gray is barred from the chiefship of his family by a famous decision of the Court of Lord Lyon in 1950 - the case of Gray Petitioner, which established that in Scots heraldic law the bearing of a compound or double-barrelled name, was an absolute bar to assuming the chiefship of a Scottish clan or family.