James had married Angus’s sister Margaret. Their children carried the blood of both Douglas houses, and the families were tied together by marriage as well as name. But being family did not mean standing together when politics turned ugly.

By 1526, Angus had gained control of the young king. James V was about fourteen years old, old enough to understand that although he wore the crown, other men were deciding where he went, whom he saw, and how Scotland was governed.

Not everyone was willing to leave him there.

That summer, Walter Scott of Buccleuch gathered men in an attempt to take the king out of Douglas hands. James of Drumlanrig joined him.

It was an extraordinary position for James to find himself in. He was a Douglas riding against other Douglases, including the family of his own wife.

The High Street was laid out with long, narrow burgage plots running off it. Over time, access lanes developed between and through these plots—the ancestors of the closes we recognize today. The closes grew organically as medieval property behind the High Street was divided, occupied, and increasingly built upon.

But the stone buildings and stairs are much later. The west-side excavation uncovered a tenement built in the late 1500s, complete with cellar floors, a corbelled cellar roof, and a turnpike stairwell—a spiral stair contained within the building. Archaeologists date that stair as part of the late-16th-century tenement complex. It wasn’t originally the big open flight of steps we experience today; it was part of the house itself.