5 Family Feuds That Turned Deadly

Scotland may lead the world in fatal family feuds. Among them was a centuries-old feud on the Isle of Skye between Clan MacDonald of Sleat and Clan MacLeod of Dunvegan, which culminated in a bloody battle in 1601. The best-known, however, is the feud between the MacDonalds and the Campbells, largely because of the Glencoe Massacre of February 1692. Government soldiers from the Earl of Argyll’s regiment, commanded by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, were quartered with the MacDonalds of Glencoe for nearly two weeks before receiving orders to attack their hosts.

But the idea that the attack was just a family feud is misleading, says historian Allan Kennedy of the University of Dundee in Scotland. The conflict was really triggered by the MacDonald chief’s accidental failure to swear loyalty a few weeks earlier to King William III. The massacre was carried out by the government to punish the clan, he says. The commander of the troops at Glencoe was Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, and some of his troops were also members of Clan Campbell. The massacre was later portrayed as a consequence of the long-standing rivalry between the Campbell and MacDonald clans. But that interpretation obscured the government’s role in ordering the killings, Kennedy says.

The tradition of family feuding also took root in Appalachia, where the Hatfield-McCoy feud became among the most famous. According to historian David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University, many Appalachian settlers descended from "borderer" families who came from the often-violent borderlands of northern England, southern Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In his book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) Fischer argues that elements of the traditional borderer code were transferred to the Appalachian backcountry in the 18th century, helping shape a culture in which family loyalty and retribution could fuel violent feuds.

The feud between the Hatfields and McCoys claimed more than a dozen lives over nearly three decades, from the Civil War era until the early 1890s, but other Kentucky family feuds were even deadlier. The Martin-Tolliver feud began amid a bitter 1884 election for Rowan County sheriff and escalated into three years of violence that left about 20 people dead. In the French-Eversole feud, a dispute between rival businessmen escalated into years of violence in southeastern Kentucky from 1887 to 1894, leaving more than 20 people dead.

The medieval family feud between the noble Percy and Neville houses became a militarized struggle for power in northern England and helped spark the Wars of the Roses, which divided England in the mid-1400s.

The feud intensified in 1453, when Thomas Neville married wealthy heiress Maud Stanhope and stood to gain the estates of Wressle and Burwell through her dowry. These lands had once belonged to the Percy family, and the Percys viewed the marriage as an intolerable expansion of Neville power. Violence erupted when Percy supporters attacked the Neville marriage party. That conflict then became intertwined with the broader struggle between rival royal factions. The Wars of the Roses, from 1455 to 1487, ultimately caused between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths and brought the Tudor dynasty to the English throne.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet centers on a fictional family feud in Verona, between Romeo's House of Montague and Juliet's House of Capulet. Shakespeare did not invent the names of the feuding families, however. Dante Alighieri mentioned the Montecchi and Cappelletti in his 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy. Both names appear to have referred to real Italian families.

Feuds over family honor were part of the tradition of vendetta in medieval and Renaissance Italy, and the resulting conflicts could engulf entire cities (“A plague on both your houses!” cried the dying Mercutio in Shakespeare's play.)

Historical examples include the feud between the Amidei and Buondelmonti families, which intensified after Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti broke a marriage engagement with a woman from the Amidei family and was murdered in 1215. According to Florentine tradition, the killing helped divide the city into the rival Guelph and Ghibelline factions. Another long-running rivalry pitted the Orsini and Colonna families against each other in Rome from the Middle Ages into the 16th century.

Albanian blood feuds, or gjakmarrja, are a centuries-old tradition of retaliatory violence associated with the Kanun, a traditional Albanian customary code of law. Although blood feuds are prohibited under Albanian law, elements of the Kanun have persisted, particularly in the mountainous regions of northern Albania. The best-known version, the Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, is associated with a 15th-century Albanian nobleman but incorporates customs that may be much older.

Family honor is central to the Kanun, which traditionally allowed a victim’s family to seek blood vengeance against an adult male member of the offending family. That killing could, in turn, provoke retaliation. As a result, some Albanian blood feuds have lasted for generations and claimed dozens of lives. One of the best-known fictional depictions appears in Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April, which follows a blood feud involving the Berisha and Kryeqyqe families.

There are fewer blood feuds today, but many persist. Some are so severe that people have fled Albania, says cultural anthropologist Antonia Young of the University of Bradford in England. Although honor remains a key element in blood feuds, contemporary disputes can also arise over issues such as property, land and even traffic accidents, she says.