: a small religious house dependent on a monastery or convent. : a one-room dwelling occupied by a solitary person (as a hermit) : a single room (as in a convent or prison) usually for one person.
Making the world better, one answer at a time. The Hatefield-McCoy feud began with the murder of Asa Harmon McCoy on January 7, 1865. Jim Vance, the uncle of Devil Anse Hatfield, despised Harmon because he had joined the Union Army during the American Civil War.
The ill feeling between the Hatfields and the McCoys probably pre-dated Ellison's shooting by seven or eight years. It may have started in 1874 when Floyd Hatfield, Ellison's cousin, and Randolph Rand'l McCoy, father of the three accused in Ellison's death, fought over who owned a semi-wild razorback hog.