john I kincardineshire
born:
died:
ascendancy: plausible descent from tancred de hauteville [1]
child: john II [1]
child: william wishart, bishop of glasgow [1]
an "evident fiction" connects this landholder further back in time to the scottish crown, suggesting he was descended from a robert who was the great-grandson of david I. this robert doesn't seem to have actually existed. yet, he is said to have "slaughtered the saracens", saracen being a sort of slang for "muslim" that was widely used to refer to the arab conquerors of sicily. so, it is fitting that a second legend connects "wishart" to "guiscard" and suggests a possible norman background. "robert guiscard" was a historical figure who is known for conquering the arab conquerors of sicily and setting up a medieval norman kingdom there. his relatives in france adopted the name.
as the wishart family seems to have it's earliest historical mention in england around the year 1200, during the period of norman control over england, the second legend seems to be more realistic; the first seems to actually be a nationalist myth to cover up norman roots. david I parceled out many plots of lands to norman knights as he converted scotland into a feudal society. a plausible theory, then, is that the wishart family was of norman descent and came to scotland via england during the reign of david I, and that this was converted into descent from david I in order to naturalize their rule over the scottish serfs.
this much seems to be established (see [2]). however, the descent directly from robert guiscard has not been preserved by history, if it is true at all. we can surmise that the process of conversion from norman to scottish ethnicity turned robert guiscard into robert, an illegitimate descendant of david I. however, there is no actual proof of this, and attempting to descend anybody at all from robert guiscard seems to be fraught with difficulties. more likely is that the descent comes from one of the norman aristocrats that adopted "guiscard" as a surname - a brother or a nephew or something else along those lines. of specific note, there seem to have been three sons of tancred that spent their whole lives in normandy and that history did not see fit to record descendants of; see the tancred de hauteville page for a further discussion. so, i've set the descent back to robert guiscard's father, tancred de hauteville. at this higher level of generality, descent of some sort is actually quite probable, even if the exact descent has been lost.
[1]: memoir of george wishart, p. 329
[2]: the british isles: a history of four nations, p. 95-97
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/gen/lines/wishart/johnIkincardineshire.html