Anstruther lies on the south-east coast of Fife, long a fishing and port town divided by the Dreel Burn, whose mouth forms a natural harbour. The place-name is commonly read from Gaelic elements, the first taken as á(i)n, “driving,” or aon, “one,” and the second, sruthair, “burn” or “stream.
Among the earliest recorded territorial baronies in Scotland, tenure begins in the twelfth century with William de Candela, a Norman granted the lands during the reign of Alexander I. Within a generation the principal house adopted the territorial style of Anstruther, while a cadet branch continued to be identified as de Candela in local usage; a direct descendant of that cadet branch holds the barony today. From the thirteenth century a family named Anstruther is found holding the barony from a castle at the Dreel Burn, and the record places the house within the main currents of the age, from Henry Anstruther’s association with the expeditions of King Louis IX to homage given to King Edward I in 1296, and later to the losses at Flodden in 1513 and Pinkie in 1547.
Meanwhile, the cadet branch that retained the de Candela identity left the barony and formed early cross-Border alliances. By the mid-twelfth century it had married into the Anglo-Norman Paynel or Paganel baronage in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire; from that alliance the northern connection was fixed, and the surname took its usual course, Paynel to Paynell to Pagnall and, in due time, to Pannell. Later intermarriage with the marcher Cliffords brought that northern blood into the same collateral line, a connection reflected in later colour and charge.
The principal Anstruther house remained in Fife. Under James VI the town was erected as a burgh of barony and subsequently as a royal burgh, marking its standing in crown service and local government. By the eighteenth century the wider kinship divided across the Stuart–Hanoverian line. The Anstruthers adhered to the established government, while members of the de Candela line, then styled Pagnall, supported the Stuart cause in 1715 and again in 1745 to 1746, so that related families stood on opposing sides. After Culloden the Pagnalls removed over the line into Northumberland, where the surname later settled in its modern form, Pannell, while the family retained awareness of its Fife origin.
Modern custodianship reflects these histories in law and in arms. The present holder’s Canadian grant of arms carries forward the Clifford palette as a condition of grant, and the Scottish grant by the Lord Lyon includes a fleur-de-lis for the Clifford association. Custodianship now rests where tenure began, in the line from which the barony first entered the record.
