Put together, these stray accounts and traditions bolster the impression of the MacNicols as a significant political and territorial force in the Medieval north-west, who experienced a traumatic loss of status in the fourteenth century that disrupted the balance of power across the region. This interpretation is supported, as David Sellar has shown, by two details in the early history of the MacLeods of Lewis. A MacLeod pedigree, now in the collection of the Royal Irish Academy, appropriates the MacNicol family tree of 1467, running without a break into the familiar rollcall of early Medieval names. Secondly, the royal grant of Assynt to the MacLeods of Lewis in 1343 included the pointed stipulation that inheritance would pass down the line of heirs "male". As Sellar puts it, 'the MacLeods had no intention of seeing "their" newly-gained lands leave the clan through an heiress!' The MS. 1467 can credibly be considered in the light of these events, in view of the surprising omission of the MacLeods from a document conceived to demonstrate the power of the Lords of the Isles and their allied families. With the MacNicols serving as councillors under the lordship, Ronald Black has suggested that the MS. 1467 aimed to assert their continuing claims over lost territories: placing John, the chief of the family, in lineal descent from the royal Norse line and the earlier possessors of Lewis. If this interpretation is followed, John's father, Ewen MacNicol, could speculatively be positioned as a brother of the heiress - either illegitimate or too young to prevent the forcible transfer of his ancestral territories into other hands.