Bisset

The Bissetts were a Norman family brought to Scotland in the train of King William the Lion after his release in 1174. In 1242 Walter Byset, lord of Aboyne, murdered the Earl of Atholl after a tournament at Haddington, burned the house to hide the deed, and fled with his nephew John to Ireland.

In Ulster the family became lords of the Glens of Antrim, and became a Gaelicised Anglo-Norman lineage. Its chiefs adopted the Irish style Mac Eoin Bissett, meaning descendant of John Byset. They also held Rathlin Island, where they sheltered Robert the Bruce at Rathlin Castle in 1306; the English dispossessed them of the island.

Late in the fourteenth century Margery Byset married John Mór MacDonnell of the Scottish Isles. The MacDonnells claimed the Glens through that marriage, later establishing their lordship of Antrim.