According to the historian G. W. S. Barrow, Gillespie Maclachlan appears in the Ragman Rolls, when the magnates of Scotland signed their allegiance to Edward I of England, in 1296, "clerks of this period writing Anglo-French documents often had difficulty with the name Lachlan, and rendered it by some form of the more familiar name Rothland, or Roland.
"I'm fully neither," he said, adding that he believes it is unwarranted to expect individuals to sign up allegiance to a nation-state.
On the night of May 2, Mr. Veljkovic and a friend went to see if they could help a friend who had been beaten and threatened by Marko and his men, and then told to turn up at a cafe and sign his allegiance to the Yugoslav Left Party run by Marko's mother, Mirjana Markovic.
This oath, an oath of allegiance signed by all officers of the Continental Army, not only didn't contain the words "So help me God," but left a blank space for each officer to fill in whether they were choosing to "swear" or "affirm".
There is a story that when the Borodin Quartet was formed, in 1945, its original members signed an oath of allegiance in their own blood.
It goes without saying that T-Mobile offers slightly better deals to people willing to sign their wireless allegiance over the for the long term, but that's the game you play when you don't want a bill sitting in your mailbox every month for two years.
Since mid-April, the government of Bahrain has urged its citizens to sign pledges of allegiance to the country's "wise leadership," saying the signatures would be inscribed on a golden sword whose existence would then be entered in the Guinness Book of World Records, in the category of... well, "sword bearing the largest number of signatures," according to the official Bahrain News Agency.
It would also accomplish three things: repudiating any claims for the legal force of signing statements, pledging allegiance to the executive branch's obligation to enforce the law, and promising transparency on those rare occasions when the president's obligations to the Constitution mean that a statute cannot be enforced consistent with our supreme national law.
Between nations, of course, the exchange of gifts has long been a sign of allegiance and a measure of the strength of an alliance.
This, I finally realised, was why sports fans wear kit: as a sign of allegiance, yes, but also to create a community.
