George MacDonald Fraser

THE STEEL BONNETS

The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers

“If Jesus Christ were emongest

them, they would deceave him,

if he woulde heere, trust and

followe theire wicked councells!”

RICHARD FENWICK 1597

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Previously published in trade paperback by Harvill 1989

Reprinted five times

First published by Harvill 1986

First published in Great Britain by

Barrie &Jenkins 1971

Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1971

The Author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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DEDICATION

In memory of

Corporal IKE BLAKELEY

of the Border Regiment, killed

by a Japanese sniper at Kinde Wood,

Central Burma, 1945, and for

BOB GRAHAM and SLIM IRVINE

wounded in the same action.

MAPS
The Border Clans

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

Introduction: The Border Reivers

Part One: THE MAKING OF A FRONTIER

I: Hadrian draws the line

II: The moving boundaries

III: England v. Scotland, 1286–1500

Part Two: PEOPLE OF THE MARCHES

IV: Border country

V: “A martial kind of men”

VI: Food and shelter

VII: The riding surnames

VIII: Hands across the Border

IX: Bangtail and company

X: The game and the song

Part Three: “SHAKE LOOSE THE BORDER”

XI: Lance and steel bonnet

XII: How the reivers rode

XIII: Nothing too hot or too heavy

XIV: A parcel of rogues (William Armstrong of Kinmont, Walter Scott of Harden, Geordie Burn)

XV: Carleton’s raid

XVI: Hot trod and red hand

XVII: The ability to kill

XVIII: The Wardens of the Marches

XIX: Leges Marchiarum

XX: Days of truce

XXI: The unblessed hand (Maxwells v. Johnstones, Grahams v. Irvines, Kerrs v. Scotts, Scotts v. Elliots, Selbys v. Grays)

XXII: Terror, blackmail, kidnapping and “decaie”

XXIII: “Fyre and sword upon Tuesday next”

Part Four: THE LONG GOOD-NIGHT, 1503–1603

XXIV: Flodden and after. Biographical note on Thomas Dacre

XXV: The Devil, and Lord Angus

XXVI: Armstrongs in action

XXVII: A rope for Black Jock

XXVIII: The violent peace

XXIX: The road to Solway Moss. Note on the prisoners of Solway Moss

XXX: The rough wooing

XXXI: Wharton and Maxwell

XXXII: England’s grip broken

XXXIII: The Debateable Land

XXXIV: The women’s touch

XXXV: Queen on the Marches

XXXVI: The Countess and the reivers

XXXVII: The last armies

XXXVIII: Reidswire and Windygyle

XXXIX: The stirring world of Robert Carey

XL: “Fyrebrande”

XLI: Lances to Carlisle

XLII: The Carleton Brothers

Part Five: THE MIDDLE SHIRES

XLIII: Carey’s ride

XLIV: Breaking the Border

XLV: Malefactors of the name of Graham

XLVI: The thieves dauntoned

XLVII: After the riding

Appendix I: The Archbishop of Glasgow’s “Monition of Cursing” against the Border reivers

Appendix II: The ballad of Kinmont Willie

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
The Border Reivers

At one moment when President Richard Nixon was taking part in his inauguration ceremony, he appeared flanked by Lyndon Johnson and Billy Graham. To anyone familiar with Border history it was one of those historical coincidences which send a little shudder through the mind: in that moment, thousands of miles and centuries in time away from the Debateable Land, the threads came together again; the descendants of three notable Anglo-Scottish Border tribes—families who lived and fought within a few miles of each other on the West Marches in Queen Elizabeth’s time—were standing side by side, and it took very little effort of the imagination to replace the custom-made suits with leather jacks or backs-and-breasts. Only a political commentator would be tactless enough to pursue the resemblance to Border reivers beyond the physical, but there the similarity is strong.

Lyndon Johnson’s is a face and figure that everyone in Dumfriesshire knows; the lined, leathery Northern head and rangy, rather loose-jointed frame belong to one of the commonest Border types. The only mystery is when the “t” which distinguishes Border Johnstones from the others of the name was dropped from his surname. Billy Graham has frequently advertised his Scottishness, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, since there are more Grahams on the southern side of the line than on the northern, but again, the face is familiar.

Richard Nixon, however, is the perfect example. The blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, and the whole air of dour hardness are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall. Take thirty years off his age and you could put him straight into the front row of the Hawick scrum and hope to keep out of his way. It is difficult to think of any face that would fit better under a steel bonnet.

None of this, possibly, is capable of definite proof, but one can at least say that the names go with the faces, and that Johnson and Nixon especially are excellent specimens of two distinct but common Border types.

It seems reasonable to suppose that the people of the Border country have not changed a great deal, physically or characteristically, in four centuries. Although the frontier line still lies between Scot and Englishman, they are now considerably mixed in the racial sense, particularly on the English side. A good half of the people of Carlisle are at least partly Scottish; there are as many Armstrongs and Johnstones as there are Forsters and Hetheringtons. But the racial composition of the Borderland generally has not altered so very much; the Elliots and Fenwicks, Bells and Nixons, Littles and Scotts, Maxwells and Kerrs (and Carrs) are still where they were in the sixteenth century, and although the Border is in many ways an even greater mental barrier than it once was, one can say that both sides together form a distinct and separate cultural and social bloc which is apart from the rest of the British people.

It is always dangerous to generalise, and one hesitates to state too dogmatically what the difference is between the Borderers¹ and the rest. They are not, to put it as tactfully as possible, the most immediately lovable folk in the United Kingdom. Incomers may find them difficult to know; there is a tendency among them to be suspicious and taciturn, and the harsh Border voice, whether the accent is Scots or English, lends itself readily to derision and complaint. No doubt there are Cumbrians who are gay, frivolous folk, and Roxburghshire probably has its quota of fawning, polished sophisticates: they are in a minority, that is all.

This is perhaps a personal point of view; it is, nevertheless, being expressed by one who is a Borderer born and raised in spite of his name. And it can always be disputed. On the credit side, there is a Border virtue which in the human scale should outweigh all the rest, and it is simply the ability to endure, unchanging. Perhaps the highest compliment that one can pay to the people of the Anglo-Scottish frontier is to remark that, in spite of everything, they are still there.

For if there are qualities in the Border people which are less than amiable, it must be understood that they were shaped by the kind of continuous ordeal that has passed most of Britain by. That ordeal reached its peak in the sixteenth century, when great numbers of the people inhabiting the frontier territory (the old Border Marches) lived by despoiling each other, when the great Border tribes, both English and Scottish, feuded continuously among themselves, when robbery and blackmail were everyday professions, when raiding, arson, kidnapping, murder and extortion were an important part of the social system.

This had very little to do with war between the two countries, who spent most of the century at peace with each other. It was a way of life pursued in peace-time, by people who accepted it as normal. It meant that no man who lived between the Scottish Southern Uplands and the Pennines could walk abroad unarmed in safety; no householder in all the Marches could go to sleep secure; no beast or cattle could be left unguarded. The seamen of the first Elizabeth might sweep the world’s greatest fleet off the seas, but for all the protection she could give to her Northumbrian peasants they might as well have been in Africa. While young Shakespeare wrote his plays, and the monarchs of England and Scotland ruled the comparatively secure hearts of their kingdoms, the narrow hill land between was dominated by the lance and the sword. The tribal leaders from their towers, the broken men and outlaws of the mosses, the ordinary peasants of the valleys, in their own phrase, “shook loose the Border”. They continued to shake it as long as it was a political reality, practising systematic robbery and destruction on each other. History has christened them the Border reivers.²

How this violent and incongruous social condition arose in the comparatively recent history of the British Isles is a strange, frequently misunderstood story.

The English-Scottish frontier is and was the dividing line between two of the most energetic, aggressive, talented and altogether formidable nations in human history. Any number of factors, including geography, race movement, and the Romans decided where the line should be, and once it was there, on the map, on the countryside, and in men’s minds, the stage was set. Possibly English on one side and Scots on the other could have lived peaceably as national neighbours—indeed, for long periods they did; but it was not in the nature of either of the beasts to stay quiet for long. No doubt they ought to have done; successive English kings thought so, and did their utmost, by fair means and foul, to bring about the amity and unity which eventually prevailed. At least, unity prevailed; amity is a more questionable commodity, especially north of the Border, even today.

But in the making of Britain, between England and Scotland, there was prolonged and terrible violence, and whoever gained in the end, the Border country suffered fearfully in the process. It was the ring in which the champions met; armies marched and counter-marched and fought and fled across it; it was wasted and burned and despoiled, its people harried and robbed and slaughtered, on both sides, by both sides. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the Borderers were the people who bore the brunt; for almost 300 years, from the late thirteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, they lived on a battlefield that stretched from the Solway to the North Sea. War after war was fought on it, and this, to put it mildly, had an effect on the folk who lived there.

What this effect was will be examined more closely later; for the moment it is enough to say that constant strife, or the threat of it, bred up a race of hard people along the Border line. They lived in a jungle, and they had to live by jungle rules. This is not to excuse them, if that were necessary, but to explain. If a man cannot live, and ensure that his family lives, within the law, he has no alternative but to step outside it.³ It was inevitable that the way of life which the Borderer had to follow in time of war should be carried over into what was nominally peace-time; habits are hard to break, and here they became so deeply ingrained as to be almost instinctive.

By the sixteenth century robbery and blood feud had become virtually systematic, and that century saw the activities of the steel-bonneted Border riders—noble and simple, robber and lawman, soldier and farmer, outlaw and peasant—at their height.

In the story of Britain, the Border reiver is a unique figure. He was not part of a separate minority group in his area; he came from every social class. Some reivers lived in outlaw bands, but most of them were ordinary members of the community, and they were everywhere in the Marches. The reiver was a rustic, but in some ways a remarkably sophisticated one. In a modern charge sheet he would probably be described as an agricultural labourer, or a small-holder, or gentleman farmer, or even a peer of the realm; he was also a professional cattle-rustler. In addition he was a fighting man who, on the evidence, handled his weapons with superb skill; a guerrilla soldier of great resource to whom the arts of theft, raid, tracking and ambush were second nature.

But he was also often a gangster organised on highly professional lines, who had perfected the protection racket three centuries before Chicago was built. He gave the word “blackmail” to the English language. For many generations he and his people formed almost a lawless state within, or between, two countries, and in spite of all that was done for their suppression, and the complicated international arrangements that were made for their regulation, they flourished until England and Scotland came under one king.

Of course they were checked and stayed, fined and hanged, pursued and evicted, when authority had the time and the strength to exert itself, but this was no more than a staunching process; the hoof-beats had not died away before they were drumming again. From the late Middle Ages until the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Marches of England and Scotland were a perpetual badman’s territory, dominated by raiders and free-booters, plunderers and rustlers, Border lords and outlaw riders.

Because it was so localised, and is now so long ago, and because the Border ballads and legends have cast a gloss of romance over it, there is a tendency to regard the high midnight of the Border reiver as a stirring, gallant episode in British history. It was not like that; it was as cruel and horrible in its way as Biafra or Vietnam. And the most unusual feature of it was that this was not, at its zenith in the sixteenth century, a case of an innocent, defenceless community in the grip of a war, or of a small criminal element’s reign of terror—the Border folk made the war and terror on themselves; it was as much a part of their lives as agriculture. It follows that they were unusual folk, and that the stamp of the old days is on them still. If the Borderer is closer and tougher and dourer than his fellow-countrymen, it is because he is the descendant of men and women who lived by and in the shadow of raid and theft and bloody murder.

How the frontier society was born and grew, how Border raiding became a systematic thing, how the two governments tried to deal with it, how it fitted into the politics and diplomacy of the two realms and into the social life of the area, and how, almost suddenly, it passed away, is the theme of this book. Some of the stories have been told before, not always accurately; immense scholarship has been applied to various aspects of the subject, and I don’t wish simply to re-tell old tales, or to presume to improve on the researches of eminent historians. But it has seemed to me, knowing something of the Border and its literature, romantic and factual, that the reivers themselves have never been given a history, and that there are still points to be made, and stories to be told, perhaps in a rather different way.

There is a school of Border writers who may be called the romantics. The first of these is the greatest man the region ever produced, Sir Walter Scott. It is not too much to say that Scott made the legendary Border as most people vaguely understand it; a land of brave men and daring deeds, of gothic mystery and fairytale beauty, of gallant Scot and sturdy Saxon, of high ideals and sweet dreams clothed in ballads that are the very heart of a nation’s poetry. All perfectly true, in its way, but not the whole story. Scott knew the other side as well, the blood and the terror and the cruelty and the crime. He, after all, understood the Borderland as probably no one else has ever done, and no other writer or scholar has done anything like as much to rescue its real history from the past. But he was a professional romantic; it was not his job to view his subject as it snarled at him over the business end of a Liddesdale lance; there were no Whartons or Scropes descending on Abbotsford by night to ransack and burn it.

One concludes that most of the romantic writers on the subject had never seen a sword or axe wielded in earnest, or seen a hanging, or a thatch burned in anger, or wakened in terror to the sound of hoof-beats. That was not their fault; but if they had known these things, a little of their enthusiasm for the glamorous side of the Border story might have been modified. Nor is patriotism, a common resort of the apologist, of much use in this context; patriotism was, as will be seen, frequently well down the scale of the Borderer’s priorities.

So, while admitting that it is difficult not to see the romantic side, it is important to keep it in perspective.

At the other extreme from the romantics are the historical specialists, who have dealt with various parts of the Border question—international politics, administration, military history, genealogical research, and a host of much smaller topics which have been examined in minute detail. These matters have been exhaustively done, but, quite rightly, they have not usually been concerned with what is called human interest. The Scottish policy of Henry VIII is a fascinating thing, offering as rich a field to the psychiatrist as to the historian, but I am less concerned with the effect that it had on, say, Franco-Scottish relations than with the more immediate and dramatic impact which it had on the good wife of Kirkcudbright who, during a skirmish near her home, actually delivered her husband up to the enemy for safe-keeping. Obviously one must take account of the machinations of Walsingham and James VI and I, but the prime consideration for me is how Nebless Clem Croser went about his business of cattle-rustling, and how the Grahams came to dispossess the Storeys, and how old Sir John Forster’s wife got the door shut in the nick of time as a band of reivers came up the stair.

It is necessary, I feel, to try to understand the Border reivers, and if not to excuse what they did, at least to see why they did it. And among all this, to try to see what it must have been like to be a wife or a mother making a home on the Marches.

At the beginning, it is as well to make one or two general points which are perhaps not commonly known. One should dispose immediately of the notion that Border raiding in peace, or even in war-time, was a straight case of England v. Scotland. It wasn’t. Raiding went both up and down and sideways. It has been common to show the English as the cops and the Scots as the robbers, but this was not the case. At this time of day no one can say who stole most from where, or who wreaked the greatest havoc; one might take a daring stab and say that probably the southern Scottish counties suffered the greater devastation, on a wide scale, as a result of English activity, including war-time inroads which cannot be classed as reiving proper—although the reiver and the soldier were often indistinguishable in war. On the other hand, the number of regular reiving forays by smaller groups was certainly greater from Scotland into England than vice versa. The net result over the centuries was probably not very different.

The important point is that it was not a one-way traffic, or even a two-way one. Scot pillaged Scot and Englishman robbed Englishman just as readily as they both raided across the frontier; feuds were just as deadly between families on the same side of the Border as they were when the frontier lay between them; Scots helped English raiders to harry north of the line, and Englishmen aided and abetted Scottish inroads. The families themselves often belonged to both sides—there were English Grahams and Scottish Grahams, for example (and no family ever made better use of dual nationality). Add to this the fairly obvious fact that sex attraction is immeasurably stronger than national policy, and the picture becomes more complex still. In spite of official opinion and even prohibition, inter-marriage took place, at least in some areas, to such a degree that one English surveyor made a point of noting particularly those Scots who did not have English family ties.

Consider also the perpetual petty jealousies, the conflict of national, family, and personal interest, the great criss-cross of vendetta and alliance, of feudal loyalty and blood tie, the repeated changing of sides and allegiances, and the general confusion bordering on chaos, and one sees that the traditional Anglo-Scottish antipathy, while it was ever-present and mattered considerably, will simply not do as an inviolable rule when one looks closely into Border reiving. National difference was at the root of the business, but it was frequently lost among the running cattle and the fell-side skirmishing.

This was what made the failure of law and order inevitable, so long as Britain was divided into two separate states. While one country could be played off against the other, while the frontier could be used as the safety line in a massive game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and while the line was crossed by all the tangled threads of blood kinship, marriage, and personal and professional alliance, the reiver system presented an insoluble problem. The international Border law, operated by the Wardens of the Marches and other Border officers, could and did sometimes work surprisingly well, but it was at best a finger in the dyke.

All in all, it is not a pretty story, but in its small way it is essential to what T. H. White called the matter of Britain. The British, and their kinsmen in America and the Commonwealth, count themselves civilised, and conceive of their savage ancestors as being buried in the remote past The past is sometimes quite close; these ancestors of Presidents Nixon and Johnson, of Billy Graham and T. S. Eliot, of Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the first man on the moon, are not many generations away.

Lastly, I should explain the plan of the book. The story of the reivers is not one that can conveniently be told in strict chronological order, so I have split it into five parts.

Part I is a brief historical sketch up to 1500, to show how the sixteenth-century Borderland was created.

Part II describes what the Border was like in that century, what manner of people lived there, who were the leading robber families, how they lived and ate and dressed and built their homes, what games they played, what songs they sang, and so forth, so that the background of the story can be understood.

Part III describes the reivers and how they rode their raids, the skills and tactics they used, how they conducted their feuds, and how they practised such crimes as blackmail, kidnapping, and terrorism. It also explains how Border law operated under the March Wardens, how the two governments tried to fight the reivers, and what it was like for the ordinary folk living in the frontier country.

Part IV is a historical survey of the reiving century, from 1503 to 1603 (when James VI of Scotland came to the English throne). It shows how the reivers fitted into the history of their time, and what part they played in the long-drawn Anglo-Scottish struggle.

Part V tells how their story ended when England and Scotland came under one king, and the old Border ceased to be.

1. Borderers—inhabitants of Northumberland, Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, Cumberland, and Dumfriesshire. Add Selkirk and Westmorland to taste.

2. Reiver, reaver—robber, raider, marauder, plunderer. The term is obsolete, but lingers on in words like bereave.

3. Satchells’ lines on the reiver philosophy are often quoted:

I would have none think that I call them thieves

The freebooter ventures both life and limb

Good wife, and bairn, and every other thing;

He must do so, or else must starve and die,

For all his livelihood comes of the enemie.

The one observation to be made is that “enemie” might mean anyone, either Scottish or English, outside the freebooter’s own circle of kinship.

PART ONE

I
Hadrian draws the line

In the beginning was the Wall. It runs across the neck of England from Solway to Tyne, a grey stone ghost to remind tourists of the mighty empire that once ruled the world from the Caspian to where Carlisle Cricket Club’s pavilion now stands. It is, by any standards, a tremendous monument, to the brilliant, witty Roman emperor who conceived it, to Aulus Platorius Nepos, legate, who supervised its building, and to the three legions who actually dug the complex of ditches and mounds, and raised the parapet and intervening fortresses. They were assisted by Roman sailors and auxiliary troops, and no doubt they received local help, if they called it that, in the fetching and carrying. In five years or thereabouts from 122 A.D. the great rampart, dotted with castles and garrisons, was stretched across the countryside, over meadow and moor, down into steep gullies and up over rocky outcrops, along cliff summits and fell sides, a living symbol of military strength and civil power.

“Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling”, wrote the great Elizabethan antiquarian Camden. While the Wall existed, no one in the region could forget Rome, or what Rome stood for.

The natives have never forgotten. In their time they fought and died over the Wall, gaped at it, played on it, reviled it, admired it, and removed its stones to make houses, dry-stane dykes, and sheep folds. Lately the Ministry of Public Building and Works have been working splendidly to restore it and have filled the mortar spaces with a curious green cement. But in spite of what Sir Walter Scott called “the ravages continually made upon it for fourteen centuries”, the Wall endures, and no doubt always will.

It is much more than a mere fortification; it is a dividing line between so many things. Between civilisation and barbarism, between safety and danger, between the tamed and the wild, between the settled country and the outland which was too hot to handle and not worth fighting over anyway, between “us” and “them”; we have seen, in our own time, how a wall across Berlin is a barrier of the spirit as much as of bricks and mortar. Hadrian’s Wall has lasted immeasurably longer than the Berlin wall ever will, and in its way it lives in the minds of people who have never even heard of it or seen it, or if they have, think of it only as an interesting relic which stands at an inconvenient distance from their cars and coaches.

Although any Northern Englishman can answer in five words the question: why was it built? (“To keep the Scots out”), there is still learned dispute on the point. The suggestion that it was erected to keep the inhabitants of England in has been advanced, not altogether frivolously; so far as the Wall was there for effect, it certainly operated in both directions. The layman, looking at its imposing size—it was originally about twenty feet high and ten wide, and although no part of it today is as tall as this, it is still an awe-inspiring barrier—may be excused for thinking it was a defensible castle wall on a gigantic scale. In fact, it was not intended to be a Maginot Line. As Viscount Montgomery has pointed out, it was a deterrent rather than a defence, which could never have resisted a well-organised invasion, and indeed the wild men from the north overran it and its chain of castles and platoon strongpoints on at least three occasions.

But it was not an obstacle that any raider could take lightly; even if he succeeded in crossing it, and escaping the attention of Roman sentries who were never more than half a mile away, and usually no doubt a good deal closer, he still had the problem of returning with whatever he had lifted on the southern side. The Wall was, in effect, a glorified police beat seventy miles long, manned by hard men who must have detested it. Any soldier hates cold and rain; to some of the men who garrisoned the wall, and who came from the Mediterranean lands, the raw damp and biting northern winds must have been intolerable. One can feel sorry for a cavalryman named Victor of the First Ala Asturum, who was born in North Africa and is buried at South Shields; he must have felt a long way from home. When one looks north into the bleak distance from Housesteads, and considers the kind of enemy who lived there, one can see that the Wall cannot have been a popular posting.

But whatever it did to the morale of Roman soldiers, the Wall had a lasting effect on the minds of those who lived either side of it. The regions and the people might have different names from those they bear today; the frontier might shift, as it did; the Romans might go and be forgotten; new waves of people and cultures might come to the land, but the Wall stayed, a permanent reminder of division. Long before there were Englishmen and Scotsmen, long before they had chosen their own subjects of contention and violence, long before there were Elliots or Fenwicks or Armstrongs or Ridleys, the frontier had been made, the line drawn. Undoubtedly, if the wall had been maintained at the outpost line of Forth and Clyde, or if, by some queer turn of history, the boundary had been established from Mersey to Humber, it would have happened there instead, in a different, unimaginable way. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, with the eye of a sound soldier and administrator, caused his wall to be built across the shortest distance and on the best defensible line. It was not his fault that the country on either side might have been designed for brigandage and foray; nor was it his fault that the people who came after were what they were. Land, until it is highly civilised and urbanised, gets the kind of people who are suited to it, and the country of the Wall was no exception.

By Hadrian’s work, however, the first tangible and lasting division was made. He did as much as anyone to ensure, quite unintentionally, that the people who live in Gretna speak with a different accent from those who inhabit Longtown, a few miles away. And the men who built the Wall in the rain, and defended it, and died beneath it, and begot their children to grow up beside it, and finally left it, probably looked back as it faded into the mist and thought what a waste of time it had all been. They were quite wrong.

II
The moving boundaries

After the Romans came the deluge. It was the time of the barbarians, whose frontiers moved with them. Once the Wall had been overrun, it ceased to matter for the time being, which was the best part of a thousand years. In that time the frontiers of middle Britain came and went as forgotten kingdoms were made and unmade. From the west came the Scots, into the long sea-lochs and mountains of Argyll; from the east the great tide of Angles, and the kingdom of Northumbria spread north across the Wall-line as far as the Forth; westward of it ran the land of Strathclyde of the Britons; in the highland north the Picts lived, and fought it out with the Scots until they were absorbed.

Norse and Danish rovers from the cold seas over Britain came to Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles, to the Northumbrian seaboard and Strathclyde; they were a strong strain whose names and faces endure across the Border country. And another influence arrived, but without force of arms; a turbulent, fearless Irish priest, Columba, and a Briton named Ninian brought the benefits of Christianity to Scotland, and south of the Wall the quiet Aidan and the shepherd, Cuthbert, spread the gospel in Northern England, not without controversy; before serious Anglo-Scottish political differences began, there was a north – south dispute over the manner in which priestly heads should be shaved.

Very gradually, out of the changing fortunes of races and kingdoms, a pattern began to emerge. English kings loosened the hold of the sea-rover people, and what may be seen as the prototype of an English-Scottish struggle took place when in the tenth century Athelstan of England fought a great and successful battle against a combined force of Scots, Norsemen, and Britons; the site of the battle is lost, but one theory is that it was fought by the flat-topped mountain called Birnswark, over the Solway.

England was slowly emerging as a nation, and although the name was still uncoined, Scotland was being born north of the Cheviot Hills. The line was coming back to something not far away from the boundary that Hadrian had drawn, across the narrow waist of Britain. In the eleventh century the mould was beginning to set; Scotland had her first great king, that Malcolm Canmore who in Shakespeare’s version has bored and bewildered generations of school children with his self-examination, but who in fact did kill Macbeth and established himself firmly on the Scottish throne.

Equally importantly, perhaps, he married, a princess of the English house of Alfred. She was a pious, thoroughly determined lady, and she seems to have inspired something like awe in the great rough fighting chief she married. In her influence on him, and on her adopted country, she was one of the most important women in Scottish history; through her, much that was English was imported, and remained with lasting effect on southern Scotland.

But the vital event of Malcolm’s reign took place far outside Scotland: in 1066 William of Normandy conquered England. In settling his kingdom he dealt ruthlessly with its northern areas, making a scorched desert from York to Durham, and floods of refugees poured over into Scotland; among them was the Princess Margaret who Malcolm of Scotland married. William was a thorough king, and as hardy a ruffian as Canmore himself; when Malcolm gave asylum to the refugees, and took up arms on their behalf, the Conqueror marched into Scotland in 1072, confronted Malcolm, made peace with him, and obtained his submission.

The last three words demand some explanation. Scottish kings had reached agreements with English rulers before; submission had been made, homage paid, and forms of superiority acknowledged. After Birnswark, Constantine of Scotland had become the vassal of Athelstan. But exactly what such agreements implied we cannot say; it is doubtful if the consenting parties could have said, either. Forms might be agreed publicly, but private interpretations would obviously vary. In later years, when Scottish kings were also English titled land-owners, the matter of vassalage had a real meaning, at least so far as their English possessions were concerned, and if an English king chose to understand vassalage in a wider sense, he was simply exploiting the situation to his own advantage, but without good moral ground.

Out of the historic tangle, there certainly emerged among English kings a belief that they had, traditionally, some kind of superiority over the Scottish king, and no doubt a feeling that for the sake of political security and unity—one might say almost of tidiness—it would be better if Scotland were under English control, or at best, added to England. This attitude can be charitably seen as politically realistic, or at the other extreme, as megalomaniac; it is all in the point of view.

Canmore made his submission, then, for what it was worth, but before long he was harrying in England again. In his earlier inroads he had done fearful damage, and carried off so many prisoners that “for a long time after, scarce a little house in Scotland was to be found without English slaves”, which no doubt helped the process of Anglicisation in southern Scotland. Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.

By then the Conqueror was dead, but his energetic successor, Rufus, was an equally powerful influence in the making of the Border. It was he who had finally taken Carlisle from the Scots in 1092, settled an English colony, and rebuilt the city which had long lain in ruins, adding to it the castle which was the parent of the present fortress, and which complemented the “New Castle” which his father had built on the eastern seaboard. In addition Rufus helped Edgar, Canmore’s son, to recover the Scottish throne, which had been in dispute after Canmore’s death.

And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years. It began when, following Rufus, Henry I married Malcolm Canmore’s daughter; the close blood tie between the rulers, England’s preoccupation with the Continent, and the absence of any major Anglo-Scottish difference, all helped to keep the peace.

In this quiet time the independent state of Scotland was finally made. The three sons of Canmore and Margaret—Edgar, Alexander, and David—shaped it in the decisive half century from 1100 to 1150. They were friends of England’s, and they helped to fashion their kingdom in England’s likeness; at the same time, England was content to leave the Scots alone.

Like their mother, the three sons were godly folk, and under them the great religious houses rose and flourished, in the Borders as much as elsewhere. They saw that organised religion was a prime instrument of political stability, and used it; they also encouraged what has been called the Norman invasion of Scotland. By promoting Norman settlement, they introduced another civilising influence in the shape of the Norman gentleman-adventurer loyal to the monarch and capable of keeping order in the area he was given to rule. Gradually the feudal system was introduced into Scotland, but although Normans were settled extensively in the Border area, the new system never entirely displaced the old pattern of clanship and family chieftainship. This never died; Border, like Highland blood, was a lot thicker than charters, and the traditional tribal loyalties endured up to and beyond the union of the crowns. Its importance in the Border country cannot be over-rated.

Under the three kings there emerged a southern Scotland very like the England over the Border. The language was the same, as were the habits and customs and systems of government; the frontier was perhaps less of a barrier then than at any other time in British history. The day was dawning which later centuries were to look back on as Scotland’s golden age. For the Borderers, on either side, it was a time when they began to forget the horrors that war had once unleashed on them from beyond the line; when the peasant in Teviotdale and Berwickshire, in Tynedale or among the Cumbrian fells, could go to sleep secure.

Not that the temple of Janus was permanently closed; on three notable occasions the armies were busy across the Marches, and there was blood and fire from the Solway to the Tyne. But three wars in a century and a half, between England and Scotland when they were still in a semi-civilised condition, is not bad going; it was tranquillity itself compared with what was to come.

These outbreaks stemmed mainly from the fact that since the Scottish kings were part-English, and had considerable stakes in England—David, for example, held land in half a dozen English counties and was an English nobleman—they took an active interest in the question of the English succession. At the same time, their political duty marched with expansionist interest, and the northern English counties, to which there was at least an arguable Scottish claim, might in the process of settling the English domestic problem be secured to the Scottish side of the frontier.

Thus the Borders suffered again. In the period 1136–38 David was over the frontier, seizing Carlisle and Newcastle and devastating Northumberland, until, when he was in full cry southwards, he encountered under the shadow of the great holy standards of the saints at Northallerton, a phenomenon that was to astound and terrify all Europe. This was the English peasant with his bow; beaten by the arrow shower, David was stopped, but he still managed to retain control of the northern shires.

Forty years later another Scottish King, William, carried his new rampant lion standard south in the debate between Henry II and his sons; he failed to take Carlisle and Wark, but wasted the countryside; a truce followed, and another invasion, and this time William divided his army, like Custer, into three, the better to scour the countryside. It was a fatal mistake; the English caught him near Alnwick, and Henry II, fresh from doing penance for Becket, no doubt felt his penitence rewarded by the capture of the King of Scots. Becket’s spirit, his religious advisers assured him, had obviously been at work on England’s behalf.

William’s ransom was submission to England, of a most comprehensive kind, hostages of rank, and various Scottish strongholds, including the Border castles of Berwick, Jedburgh, and Roxburgh. However, Richard the Lionheart, when he found himself pressed for money, sold most of these advantages back to Scotland.

Much worse than either of these wars, from the Border point of view, was the outbreak of 1215, when the young Scottish king, Alexander II, became involved in the English civil war of King John and the barons. Aiding the Northern English lords, Alexander provoked a terrible retaliation from John; the Eastern Marches on both sides of the frontier were ravaged; Morpeth, Alnwick, Roxburgh, Dunbar, Haddington, and Berwick were burned, and the inhabitants of the last brutally tortured by John’s mercenaries; “the king himself disgracing majesty by setting fire, with his own hand, to the house in which he had lodged”.¹

The Scottish retaliatory sweep through the English Borders was equally barbarous. As in the English inroad, churches and monasteries suffered along with the rest, and one ancient chronicler noted with satisfaction that a great number of the despoilers of one Cumbrian abbey were drowned in the Eden, weighed down with their loot.

But in the end, all that Scotland achieved was the loss forever of the Northern English counties; the Border line was finally established more than 1000 years after Hadrian, from the Solway to Berwick. It made no great difference to the Border people, who might well have been thankful that despite David and William the Lion and Henry II and John, and the petty squabbling for the English throne, the Marches had, by and large, been left reasonably peaceful during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In that time, the Border as a separate entity came into being; divided and yet united by a strange chemistry far above international politics. Half-English, half-Scottish, the Border was to remain a thing in itself; there, as nowhere else, however much they might war and hate and destroy in centuries to come, Englishmen and Scotsmen understood each other.

1. Ridpath. The Border History, p. 85.

III
England v. Scotland, 1286–1500

The golden age, of Scotland, of Anglo-Scottish harmony, and of the Border country, ended when King Alexander III of Scotland fell over a cliff in 1286. Few stumbles—if indeed His Majesty was not pushed—have been more important than that one.

Until then, as we have seen, the frontier had not been an unusually troubled place. It had suffered, but not too severely by medieval standards; the two countries had been growing up and finding their feet. The year 1286 was to see the opening of a new era. From then onward Scotland was to be of increasing importance to England. This was bound to happen as England developed as a nation state; inevitably, too, a new Anglo-Scottish relationship was born. The reasons why these things happened are simple enough, but they are fundamental to British history, and they changed the shape of the world. The new Anglo-Scottish attitudes which were assumed after 1286 have developed and been modified, but even today they bear the imprint of those decisive years in the late thirteenth century when the relationship between England and Scotland was so decisively altered.

It may not be out of place to leave the mainstream of history just for a moment, to look closer at what I have called Anglo-Scottish attitudes. In simple terms—one might call them historically colloquial—and with tremendous daring, one can try to look at the traditional English-Scottish relationship from what, one hopes, is as nearly impartial a British point of view as possible. (Practically every word of what follows will be denied, refuted, and laughed to scorn somewhere or other; I would only remark that the conclusions have been reached by a Scot born and bred in England, and accustomed to being regarded as a Scotsman south of the Border, and an Englishman north of it. Which in itself is probably significant of the attitudes on both sides).

The Scot has, and one suspects always has had, something of an inferiority complex where his big, assertive, overpowering neighbour is concerned. It is no wonder. The English race are certainly the most dynamic in history since the Romans. Within a few hundred years they turned themselves from a little nation state on an off-shore European island into the most profound influence in the world; they spread themselves, their language, their products, and above all, their ideas, over the face of the earth. There has never been anything quite like them. Admittedly, at their peak they had the Scots helping them, and only a national extremist would worry about whether the Scots’ contribution, per capita, was above or below average. The point is that the English were by far the major share of the effort; as a national powerhouse, they were in a class by themselves.

Scotland has lived with and alongside this for several centuries, and that in itself is an achievement. If anything in their history demonstrates that the Scots are remarkable, it is that in spite of being physically attached to England, they have survived as a people, with their own culture, laws, institutions, and, like the English, their own ideas.

But it has not been easy, and the marks show. The Scots are an extraordinarily proud people, with reason, as they are quick to point out, and like most geniuses, highly sensitive. Where England is concerned, this sensitivity borders on neurosis. Buried deep in the Scottish national consciousness is the memory of a cliff-hanging struggle for independence, which lasted more than three centuries in the physical sense, and in the minds of some Scots continues today. They know, better than anyone, how easily England spread itself, often apparently without trying, and the fear of English domination by force has to some extent been replaced by a fear of English supremacy almost by default

In fact, if the Scot would look, or could look, objectively at his history, he would see that the English menace was perhaps over-rated, not in physical terms, for there it was truly immense, but in what can only be called a spiritual sense. Scotland’s vitality has always been strong enough, and to spare, to resist outside influence.

But a small country that survives in Scotland’s situation, under the shadow of a reigning champion, becomes quite naturally suspicious, sensitive, and fiercely jealous in regard to its neighbour. It fears him, but cannot help imitating him and being drawn to him. England appreciates this situation completely; the canny Henry VII put it into words when he noted that the larger inevitably attracts the smaller. And from its position of superiority it is natural that England should tend to overlook its smaller neighbour, and take Scotland very much for granted. Indeed, to England, Scotland is an appendage, an extension of the English whole, and when Scotland, resenting this attitude, makes its indignation known, the English are well aware that to find the indignation trivial or amusing is the very way to drive the Scot to distraction.

It must not be thought from this that the English under-rate the Scots. Far from it; they may forget or ignore Scotland, and patronise manifestations of Scottishness, but for the Scots people, for the Scot as an individual when he comes to their attention, they reserve a higher respect than they show to anyone else. They recognise the Scots as formidable, and are secretly just a little frightened of them. In their case it may not be folk-memory, although Scotland in its time was a very real danger to England, simply by virtue of its existence on the same island; more probably it has its roots in the knowledge that a Scotsman on the make is a terrible thing.

The present state of Anglo-Scottish relations, if one can call them that, and the beginning of their peaceful relationship in the sixteenth century, are to be traced to the same root: England was a menace to Scotland because Scotland was, by its separate existence, a constant anxiety to England. In the sphere of medieval politics, and in the politics of a later day, Scotland was a key to England—a foreign and potentially hostile and dangerous state on her very border, offering a stepping-stone to England’s enemies, and not infrequently joining in against England when the latter was busily engaged on the Continent. How great a menace this posed was seen even after the union of the crowns, when only two centuries ago the London government found itself within an ace of falling to northern invasion.

To successive English monarchs Scotland was an embarrassment; for the safety of the English realm a neutral if not amiable Scotland was a necessity, and the surest—indeed, some thought the only—way to that happy state was to have Scotland firmly under English control. A reasonable enough point of view, but an objective to be realised only by the most skilful management, great strength, and endless patience. It took almost 500 years, in the long run. The period from 1286 to 1500, with which we are now concerned, in which the condition of the people in the Border districts was so radically influenced, occupied about half that time.

One can take as a starting point the night in March 1286 on which the Scottish King, Alexander III, in haste to return to his beautiful wife, set off in the dark against his counsellors’ advice, and broke his neck in falling from the path. Scotland was left, for once, in a reasonably quiet and prosperous condition, united and in a viable national state. But with the death of Alexander the throne passed from a good king, in the prime of life, to an infant, his grand-daughter Margaret, who was not even in the country.

Subsequently Edward I of England saw the possibilities of bringing Scotland under control. A marriage between his son and the infant queen seemed the logical step, but Margaret died in 1290, and Scotland was left with a most difficult question of succession. To cut a long story short, Edward used the situation to realise his own claim to overlordship of Scotland. Balliol, his puppet on the Scottish throne, so far forgot himself as to conclude an alliance with France, and Edward’s high-handedness and interference in Scottish internal affairs was answered by Scottish inroads into Cumberland and Northumberland in 1296. “They wrought some mischief”, and whatever the immediate damage done to the English Borderers, the consequences were dramatic.

The preliminaries to open war included, on Edward’s side, the seizure of property held in England by dissident Scots, and the massacre by the Scots of English sailors at Berwick. Edward, at Newcastle with a considerable force, demanded Balliol’s appearance in vain; while he was waiting he learned that the lord of the English castle of Wark had abandoned his charge and gone over to the Scots, “the violence of his passion for a Scotch lady … proving too strong for his bond of duty to his king”. Edward sent reinforcements to Wark, but the fugitive English lord returned unexpectedly with a Scottish raiding party and cut the reinforcements to bits in the dark. (Not a major incident in the campaign, but a perfect example of how national and personal affairs crossed and countered each other on the Border, and how Anglo-Scottish attraction could be even more powerful than Anglo-Scottish distaste. Here was the Borderer, self-sufficient and apart, using the frontier for his own ends in despite of central authority.)

Edward is said to have thanked God that he hadn’t started the war; he did not doubt his capacity to finish it. He waited at Wark with his army, which included some Scottish nobles, among them a rugged young knight named Robert Bruce.

Nor did he have to wait long. The Scots, arming on the Borders for the crunch which was obviously coming, struck first across the western march. They devastated the country north of Carlisle, burned the city’s suburbs, and stormed the walls which were England’s bastion on the north-west frontier. The city held, not for the first or last time, with its womenfolk lending assistance in hurling stones and hot water down on the besiegers, and the Scots retired over the Border again.

Edward ignored them. He had made his plan, and he carried it out with ruthless efficiency. He took Berwick, the Scots suffering dreadful loss. No one can be sure quite how extensive or callous the massacre was, yet it is of some importance, because certain historians fix on Berwick’s fall as a turning-point in Anglo-Scottish relations. The general opinion is that 7000 to 8000 Scots were killed; it does appear that Edward deliberately killed every man capable of bearing arms. One version says that later the women—and presumably the children—were sent into Scotland.

On the other hand, it has been suggested that the English slaughtered everyone in the town, regardless of age or sex. “Indiscriminate butchery”, says one historian,¹ and the total of dead has been placed as high as 17,000. It is certainly not impossible that Edward ordered a general massacre, pour encourager les Ecossais; he was perfectly capable of it. If he did, then there may be grounds for the contention that this, more than anything else, bred hatred of England north of the line. I would doubt it; at least, so far as its lasting effect is concerned, it seems unlikely that Scottish reivers three centuries later were galloping south thinking “Remember Berwick”. But even if its effect has been overstated, the Berwick massacre was another strong link in the chain of Anglo-Scottish hostility.

Edward now addressed himself to bringing Scotland to heel. It was not difficult. He marched through eastern Scotland as far as Elgin, defeating the Scots at Dunbar en route, received submission on all sides, appropriated the Stone of Destiny, and so back to Berwick again. He had taken five months over the campaign, and only once had to spend a night under canvas.

But Edward, like many native Scottish kings, was to discover that it was easier to get control of Scotland than to keep it. His triumphal progress had been designed to show Scotland who was master; in the place of the abject Balliol he left only a governor, John de Warrenne, but with English garrisons in the castles, English justice, and English taxes. It was not enough for the task, as Edward should have realised. To subdue Scotland, he would have had to treat it as he had treated Berwick. Instead, he made his tour, left behind an elderly and incompetent governor, and hoped for peace. What he got was William Wallace.

The story of the Scottish revolt has been told so many times that one need not go into it again. Its political effects were enormous, not least along the Border. While first Wallace and later Bruce carried the torch, while Edward, probably the ablest soldier-king England ever had, came again and died, old and done, in the Cumberland marshes, while the battles were fought and the English gradually borne southward again, the Borders learned what it was to be a no man’s land. After Wallace’s victory at Stirling, where the Scots gave a foretaste of things to come by flaying the corpse of Edward’s detested treasurer, Cressingham, Northern England had been invaded; Northumberland was subjected to systematic plunder and devastation; to the west, Carlisle again held out, but Cumberland was laid waste as far as Cockermouth and the Lakes. The county struck back, and Clifford’s Cumbrians harried Annandale, slaughtering and burning. So it went on, to and fro, and while Scotland and England settled the great issue, the Borderland was being created in a sense that neither set of national leaders would have understood. Edward and Wallace left a terrible legacy, and to the people of the Marches it hardly mattered who had started it all. One thing the war ensured; whatever treaties might be made and truces agreed at the top, however often a state of official peace existed, there was never again to be quiet along the frontier while England and Scotland remained politically separate countries.

Bannockburn was the high point in Scotland’s fight for independence. Bruce, whatever reservations may be held about his character, was that rare combination of an inspiring leader, a good general, and a personally expert fighting man. Under his supervision, the finest army England had ever put into the field was destroyed in two days; the English chivalry broke its heart against the steel rings of the Scottish infantry, and by night on the second day England’s king was in flight, the best of his country dead or captured, and his father’s dream of a unified Britain had evaporated. Indeed, it had been easier to take a kingdom from the son than a yard of ground from his father.

It was a smashing victory, and the general dismay in England was especially strong in the north, with good cause. Scottish forces under Edward Bruce and James Douglas poured into the English East March; Northumberland was pillaged again, and Durham only escaped similar treatment by paying a mighty ransom. Yorkshire and Westmorland were less fortunate, being plundered of cattle and prisoners; Appleby was sacked and burned, along with other towns; Redesdale and Tynedale, favourite targets of later raids, were ravaged, and Cumberland was forced to disgorge tribute to the Scottish king.

Bruce had been humane to his beaten enemies at Bannockburn; it is interesting to note that the surviving invaders of Scotland probably received better treatment than the civilian inhabitants of the northern shires who had taken no part in the campaign. Not that this was inconsistent with the chivalric code; indeed, it seems to have been part of it.

A significant feature of this Scottish invasion was that it saw the levying of vast indemnities from the English Borderers; Bruce set the example, on a large scale, for those later generations of Border gangsters who made blackmail and protection racketeering systematic.

Without going into further detail of the great raids and counterraids of this period, it can be judged in what condition the War of Independence left the Borderland. It had been most brutally used; in addition to the ravages of the contending armies, there had been an unusually heavy rainfall in the year after Bannockburn; seed rotted, crops could not be got in, sheep and cattle were dying. When Edward II again marched into Scotland in 1315 “bread could scarcely be found for the sustenance of his family”,² and the expedition was abandoned. It was as bad on one side as on the other—so bad, that another Border phenomenon emerged.

“Many of the English who dwelt nigh the Marches, wearied out with their sufferings, and despairing of protection from their own king, abandoned their country, and confederating with the Scots, became companions and guides of their incursions into England, and sharers with them of the spoils of their unhappy countrymen”.³

The guide-lines were being drawn with a vengeance; in the struggle for survival the Border was learning new rules. Before the war, raiding and foraying across the frontier has been less than a local industry; invasions and attacks there had certainly been, in time of war, but for more than a century before Edward I began to practise his Scottish policy, the Border had been at peace with itself. The years of Bruce and Wallace and the two Edwards changed all that; a new order was instituted, not by any positive attempt of policy, but by a gradual and inevitable development. People who have suffered every hardship and atrocity, and who have every reason to fear that they will suffer them again, may submit tamely, or they may fight for survival. The English and Scots of the frontier were not tame folk.

When the War of Independence began the Borders had been moving forward towards civilisation; when they ended the people of the Marches had returned to something like the cave ages. Centuries of progress had been destroyed in a generation, and the natives, to quote Scott, had been carried back in every art except those which concerned the destruction of each other.

Partly this arose from the type of war prescribed, says Fordun, by Bruce for the defeat of the invading English.

On foot should be all Scottish war

By hill and moss themselves to wear;

Let wood for walls be bow and spear.

In strait places gar keep all store,

And burn the plain land them before;

Then shall they pass away in haste,

When that they find naething but waste.

With wiles and wakening on the night,

And meikle noises made on height.

Che Guevara would have approved every word of it. The Scots, unable except on a few notable occasions to match the might of England in pitched battle, fought a campaign to which their people and country were particularly suited. They scorched the earth, destroyed their own homes and fields, took to the hills and the wilderness with their beasts and all they could move, and carried on the struggle by on-fall, ambush, cutting supply lines, and constant harrying. It was a wasting, cruel war, and they carried it into England whenever they could, so that both sides of the Border suffered alike.

What resulted was not only guerrilla warfare, but guerrilla living. In times of war the ordinary Borderers, both English and Scottish, became almost nomadic; they learned to live on the move, to cut crop subsistence to a minimum and rely on the meat they could drive in front of them. They could build a house in a few hours and have no qualms about abandoning it; they could travel great distances at speed and rely on their skill and cunning to restock supplies by raiding. All these things they were forced to do while English and Scottish armies marched and burned and plundered what was left of their countryside. This was how they were to live whenever war broke out for the next two and a half centuries.

Unfortunately, to the ordinary people, war and peace were not very different. The trouble with all Anglo-Scottish wars was that no one ever won them; they were always liable to break out again. There was no future for the Borderer in trying to lead a settled existence, even in so-called peace-time. Why till crops when they might be burned before harvest? Why build a house well, when it might be a ruin next week? Why teach children the trades of peace when the society they grew up in depended for its existence on spoiling and raiding?

And of course there was national hatred, ever growing. The other country was always the author of all ills, and it was natural to take revenge.

So they had to live as best they could, and in the two centuries following the War of Independence the Border developed its system of existence, which was seen in full flower in the sixteenth century, between Flodden and the accession of a Scottish king to the throne of England. It was a system of armed plunder, from neighbours as well as from subjects of the opposite realm. The astonishing thing about it was that, while both governments officially deplored what must be called the reiver economy, they exploited it quite cynically for their own ends. The Borders were an ever-ready source of fighting men, a permanent mobile task force to be used when war broke out. If by some strange process of mass hypnosis, all the Elliots and Armstrongs and the like on one side, and all the Forsters and Musgraves on the other, had suddenly been induced to burn their weapons and become peaceful peasants, there would have been consternation in London and Edinburgh. The Border, in a sense, was a bloody buffer state which absorbed the principal horrors of war. With the benefit of hindsight, one could almost say that the social chaos of the frontier was a political necessity.

In fairness to the two central authorities, they did try to pacify as far as they could, and this not being very far, they too adapted to the special conditions. Rules were drawn up for governing, if that is the word, the turbulent Anglo-Scottish Border society. The Wardens, again both English and Scottish, who were to be the nominal overseers of the community, made their appearance at the time of the War of Independence, and their roles as defenders of their respective national frontiers and co-operating governors of the Marches, developed from there. But the laws that were made specially for the Borders were self-defeating; they were in themselves a recognition of abnormality, and at worst they even encouraged it.

So the reiving system developed. From the Bannockburn era onwards the tenor of Border life was geared to it, and no medieval political development was strong enough to alter it. In a medieval context, what happened on the Border does not stand out especially, because it blended into those violent times. But with the advance of civilisation, the gradual alteration of human values, the tendency—admittedly not all that noticeable sometimes—to prefer diplomacy to violence, the anachronism of Border life was seen in greater relief. In the sixteenth century, when England at least was beginning to look far beyond her own coasts, when the spirit of Western man was being reborn, when internal peace was a not uncommon occurrence, the men of the Border were still going their old ways, lifting and looting, settling their disputes largely by force, clinging to their old customs and their own peculiar ethical code. Theirs was a frontier on which only the fittest had survived; what emerged in the 1500s was a very hardy growth.

1. Hume Brown.

2. Ridpath, p. 173. 3. Ibid.

PART TWO

IV
Border country

Ask a Scotsman where “the Borders” are and he will indicate the counties of Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, and Berwick. This is actually about one quarter of the Borderland, and includes some areas which are not really Border country at all. To most Scots the country which used to be called the West March is not within “the Borders”, a curious example of eastward orientation which has historical roots.

Ask an Englishman where “the Borders” are and he may well not know, but he will recognise the singular “Border”. To him it means the frontier with Scotland and nothing else.

This has to be explained, because the adjective Border in the context of this book covers that much wider area occupied by the old Marches, three in each country, which stretched on the Scottish side from the River Cree to the North Sea coast, and on the English from the coast of Cumberland to that of Northumberland. In Scotland the depth of the Marches was bounded by the Lammermuir Hills and the Southern Uplands; in England they covered, to all intents, the counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Northumberland. (It is worth remembering that the frontier line does not run straight east and west between the two countries, but south-west to north-east, and that at some points Scotland is actually south of England.)

The whole region, the very heart of Britain, contains some of the loveliest and some of the bleakest country in the British Isles. Along the central part of the frontier line itself is the great tangled ridge of the Cheviots, a rough barrier of desolate treeless tops and moorland with little valleys and gulleys running every way, like a great rumpled quilt. They are not very high, although they were steep enough to frighten Defoe and make his horse “complain”, but they are bleak and lonely beyond description, ridge after ridge of sward and rough grass stretching away forever, and an eternal breeze sweeping across the tufty slopes. One walks in them with head constantly turning to the long crests on either side, but seeing nobody. Like their relations, the Cumberland fells and the broken foothills of the Southern Uplands, they are melancholy mountains; probably only the Border people feel at home in them, but even the incomer will recognise them as the most romantic hills in the world.

To the north are the Scottish dales, the Scott country which has had all the adjectives lavished on it, and is indeed beautiful, with its bright rivers and tree-lined valleys and meadows, its fairytale hills and its air of timelessness. “The beautiful valleys full of savages”, as someone called them. South of the Cheviots are the Northumberland valleys, less picturesque than their Scottish counterparts, and suffering by comparison with the splendid dales of Lakeland to the west.

At either end of the Cheviots there are coastal plains and good farmlands—they were good even in the sixteenth century—but for the most part the Border is mountain, for where the Cheviots stop the hills to north and south continue, fells and Pennines and Southern Uplands. It is the hills that people remember; “craggi and stoni montanes”, as John Leland called them in the 1530s, and his contemporaries echoed him. “Lean, hungry and waste” was Camden’s view. Even from a distance one can conjure up sinister pictures from the names of the Border hill country—Foulbogskye, Ninestanerig, Muckle Snab, Bloody Bush, Slitrig, Flodden, Blackcleuch, Wolf Rig, Hungry Hill, Crib Law, Foul-play Know, Oh Me Edge, Blackhaggs, and so on; it is obviously not a palm-fringed playground.

The Border country was divided for administrative purposes into six areas known as Marches, three on the Scottish side and three on the English. Each of the six Marches had a governing officer known as a Warden, appointed by their respective governments; a detailed description of their work is given in Chapter XVIII, but for the moment it will do to say that their duties were to defend the frontier against invasion from the opposite realm in war-time, and in peace to put down crime and co-operate with the Wardens across the Border for the maintenance of law and order. Unfortunately they often fell far short in this duty; some of them were actually among the worst raiders and feuders on the frontier. The extent of the Marches which they ruled in the sixteenth century is shown on the pull-out map near the end of the book.

The English and Scottish East Marches were the smallest of the six, though by no means less important than the others. They fronted each other exactly along the Borderline from near Carham on the Tweed to a point just north of Berwick, and if any stretch of the frontier could claim to have comparatively law-abiding inhabitants, it was this. Left to themselves, they might have been quiet enough, but they were never left; the good farm lands towards the coast attracted severe raiding from the Middle Marches, and there were no natural mountain defences, but only “plain champian countrey”; the river Tweed was very easily fordable.

In war-time the East Marches suffered particularly badly, for through them came most of the English and Scottish armies, bringing ruin in their wake. It was the obvious route, for the coastal plain afforded the easiest passage and the best forage, and Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, lay on the east, as did the important English bases at Berwick, Newcastle, and Alnwick. And unlike the fiercer tribes of the Middle and West Marches, the men of the east were less likely to make the invader’s passage uncomfortable.

Being small, the Eastern Marches were easier to control. On the Scottish side the Hume family reigned almost unchallenged, locally at least, and Hume Castle was an inland bastion against invasion. Around it lay the Merse, the fertile plain which was Scotland’s storehouse and even supplied the English East March with food: the garrison at Berwick depended entirely on the Merse for their supplies in peace-time, and as one of their commanders, John Carey,¹ put it, if Hume stopped the Merse farmers selling to Berwick, “we need no other siege”. It is significant that Carey, writing to Burghley² at a time when other Border officials had little good to say of their national opposites, spoke of the Merse Scots as “our good neighbours, who supply our markets with beef, mutton, veal, pork, and all kinds of pullyn (poultry), without which we could not live”.

1. One of the most striking monuments to imperial Rome still in existence, Hadrian’s Wall runs across the wasteland of middle Britain between Solway and Tyne. Although large portions of it have vanished, and what remains is considerably reduced from its original height, it is still the best preserved of the legions’ frontier fortifications. This view, looking westward from Housesteads, the central fortress on the Wall, shows clearly how the Roman engineers used the natural barriers of hillside and escarpment as a basis for their great rampart, the first and decisive division between north and south Britain.

2. Part of the massive fortifications of Berwick-on-Tweed, which the English government once regarded as the country’s most important garrison. Despite the imposing appearance of these works today, the records of Berwick in Elizabeth’s time are full of warnings of decay and disrepair, and urgent pleas from officials for the defences to be strengthened. Lord Willoughby, governor in the 1590s, thought Berwick was strong only in appearance, and observed: “Ther hath bene infinite cost bestowed, and nothinge parfytted.”

3. A few miles above Moffat, where the Edinburgh road runs into the lonely mountain country of the northern Borderland, the ground falls dramatically away into a great cleft among the hills. Although it lies a long way from the frontier line itself, on the very limit of the Scottish Marches, this is traditionally believed to have been a common hiding-place for stolen cattle—hence its name, the Devil’s Beef Tub.

4. Smailholm, not far from Kelso, was a Pringle stronghold, and is one of the finest examples of a Border tower. Built on a rocky outcrop, with the remains of an outer barnekin wall still to be seen round the western side, it commands a wide view and must have been unusually difficult to besiege. It has four floors, the lowest one vaulted, with the main apartments above, and is unusual in that it still has its roof and an iron grille over its main door. Scott’s poem The Eve of St John is set at Smailholm, and describes how the lady of the tower entertained as her lover the ghost of a knight killed by her husband. The tower is now uninhabited.

His concern underlines the importance of Berwick to England. It was in effect the capital of the Borders, and this although in peace-time it stood only on the fringe of the action. It was England’s strongest fortress town, and most of the correspondence of its officers is concerned not with Border matters, but with details of its defences, its stores, garrison, armament, and finances. In the critical year of 1587, Lord Hunsdon³ was reporting at length on its condition—a garrison of 667 men (“these nombers are well to be lyked”, Burghley noted)—with a minute description of the height of its battlement, the depth of its ditches, and the characters of its pensioners. “Robert Moore, a verie proper man, Thomas Jackson, a good tall fellow, John Shaftowe, a tall able man as anie is”, and so on. Considering the number of times it had changed hands in the past, England’s concern is understandable; Berwick was her eyes, ears and shield on the eastern seaboard. Although we read much of decay and repairs in the second half of the sixteenth century, the town’s equipment in earlier years rivalled that of any stronghold in Europe.

Wark was another English fortress of importance in the early days, and changed hands frequently, the English once recapturing it by crawling along a sewer from the Tweed into the kitchen. In Elizabeth’s time, however, it was gradually falling into ruin. Norham was the other principal hold of the English East March, but it too was allowed to decay, and in 1595 surveyors estimated that the necessary repairs would cost £1800, say £20,000 of our money. What they got was £2 14s 9d, to repair the powder store only, a nice example of Elizabeth’s thrifty house-keeping.

The Middle Marches were something else. They fronted each other across the Cheviots, and the Scottish Middle March overlapped to touch the English East and West Marches as well. The Middle Marches saw by far the most numerous raids, for the broken country was ideal for reiving, and the same place names crop up again and again. On the English side Redesdale to the east and Tynedale farther west were prime targets, and in turn they were themselves great nests of reivers. Their names can be taken to cover much wider areas than the mere valleys of the Rede and Tyne; the old Franchise of Tyndale extended south from the Border in a tongue forty miles long by fifteen wide.

Alnwick, Harbottle, and Otterburn were the principal centres of law and order on the English side, although Harbottle Castle was pronounced in 1595 a prison unfit for felons and a house unfit for anyone.⁴ The decay into which all but the principal English fortresses were allowed to fall indicates their declining importance as actual strongholds, but even in partial ruin they were often usable as headquarters for Border officials.

The Scottish Middle March contained as choice a collection of ruffians as ever was seen in one section; here were the Kerrs, both of Cessford and Ferniehurst, and the Scotts, and running across the March, parallel with the frontier and barely a dozen miles from it, was one of the most beautiful and dreaded valleys in Europe: Teviotdale. Hawick, Kelso, and Jedburgh were the principal towns, and the March was littered with those towers which were the homes of the robber families. The criminal traffic across the Middle March frontier was enormous; it was wide, and desolate, and criss-crossed by the secret ways of the raiders, through the mosses and bogs and twisting passes of Cheviot, the “high craggy hills” above Teviotdale, and the bleak Northumberland valleys. This was the hot trod⁵ country, the scene of the Redeswire Raid and the massive forays when as many as three thousand lances came sweeping over the moorland to harry Coquetdale or to make a smoking waste from Teviothead to the Jed Water. No Wardens carried such a burden as those of the Middle Marches; it was, as one of them said, “an unchristened country”.

Yet there was worse to the west, for this was the tough end of the frontier. Technically part of the Scottish Middle March, but linked by geography and tradition with the Western Marches, was Liddesdale, the cockpit of the Border and the home of its most predatory clans. It had what amounted to a Warden of its own, known as the Keeper, and from it were mounted the most devastating raids, usually into the English Middle March. Its people and their misdeeds make up such a considerable portion of this book that there is no need to say more about them at present, but the valley itself is worth more than a line.

Few people go to it, even today; Sir Walter Scott is supposed to have taken the first wheeled vehicle into the dale less than two centuries ago. To get the full flavour, it should be visited in autumn or winter, when its stark bleakness is most apparent. It is empty, drear and hard; there are never many cars on the road, which winds up to Newcastleton and then turns westward into a little glen that manages to tell the traveller more about the dark side of Border history in a glance than he can learn by traversing all the rest of the Marches.

Through the bare branches he suddenly catches sight of the medieval nightmare called Hermitage, a gaunt, grey Border castle standing in the lee of the valley side, with a little river running under its walls. The Hermitage, which took its name supposedly from a holy man who once settled there, is not a big place, but in its way it is more impressive than Caernarvon or Edinburgh or even the Tower of London. For it is magnificently preserved, and one sees it as it was, the guard house of the bloodiest valley in Britain. One is not surprised to learn that an early owner was boiled alive by impatient neighbours; there is a menace about the massive walls, about the rain-soaked hillside, about the dreary gurgle of the river.

It was a Douglas place once, and then the Bothwells had it; Mary Queen of Scots came there to her wounded lover after the Elliots had taught him not to take liberties, Borderer though he was. In the latter days of the reivers it had a Captain, who held it for the Keeper of Liddesdale, and tried to enforce the law on the unspeakable people who inhabited the valley. Their influence seems to hang over it still, and it is a relief to take the Hawick road and leave Hermitage behind.

Westward of Liddesdale is a desolate moss called Tarras, where the reivers and their families used to retreat when outraged authority came in force to wreak vengeance on them, and beyond it lies the Scottish West March proper, Eskdale, the Dumfriesshire plain, and the gorgeous valleys of the Annan and the Nith. The West March of Scotland, although its people probably did England rather less damage than the Middle March clans, was in a state of constant feud and turmoil, thanks largely to the lasting enmity of the Johnstones and Maxwells, and to English inroads. The castles of Caerlaverock, Lochmaben, Langholm, and Lochwood are repeatedly mentioned in the histories of the March, and Annan and Dumfries were the main centres, as they are today.

Much of the West March frontier is covered by the tract once known as the Debateable Land, a unique area of disputed territory with a special place in Border history which is described in Chapter XXXIII.

The English West March, consisting of Cumberland and Westmorland, would appear to have been living on the lip of a lion, with Liddesdale’s robber hordes and the fierce clans of the Scottish West March all within easy riding distance. Yet Cumberland, as a whole, seems to have suffered rather less from regular foray than the English Middle Marches.⁶ Its immediate frontier region, the eastern fells and the Bewcastle Waste which was a notable haunt of outlaws and was constantly traversed by the Liddesdale raiders, did indeed see its full share of foray and violence, but the rich pastures of the Eden valley and the western plain should have been a much more tempting target. They were far from immune, but they probably took less continuous hammering than Redesdale or Tynedale.

There were several reasons for this. The English West March was the strongest of the six, with its string of holds dotted eastward from the Solway—Rockcliffe, Burgh (where the fortified church is still to be seen), Scaleby, Askerton, Naworth, Bewcastle, and others. The broad Eden, like the treacherous Solway tides, was a genuine barrier, and farther south there were castles at Penrith, Cockermouth, and Greystoke, while the remains of the once-great Inglewood and Westward Forests were refuges for folk and cattle when invasion threatened. Most important of all, across the main route south and within an hour’s easy ride of the frontier lay the fortress-city of Carlisle.

Second to Berwick in political importance, and in the strength of its defences, Carlisle was nevertheless the hub of the Borderland. It was the biggest community in all the Marches, and the only actual city; every Borderer, English and Scot, knew it well, with its great red castle, its ancient cathedral and grammar school and market, and its famous gallows on the Harraby Hill, where a new hotel now stands. Time and again, in the old wars when the frontier burst open, Carlisle held; siege and endurance were part of its life—indeed, they were what it was there for. By the sixteenth century it had been hit with everything that invasion could throw at it, and it had seen them all—Romans, Normans, sea-rovers, mercenaries from the ends of Europe, and British warriors of every variety. Even its bishops were fighting men, and in the battle its women helped to man its walls. There is little of those walls left now, but the turbulent history of the city is to be read in the stones of the tiny cathedral, where one style of architecture is piled on another, testimony to centuries of destruction and repair.

In spite of its richly romantic past, which takes in King Arthur, Mary of Scotland, Cromwell, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and a long list of famous monarchs, Carlisle is no more history-conscious than a New Town. Its corporation, with a tasteful delicacy worthy of their bandit ancestors, transformed the magnificent northern approach across the Eden by adding to the fine silhouette of castle and cathedral a stark modern atrocity in concrete. Even the name of its ancient Grammar School, one of the oldest in Britain, has been allowed to vanish. Still, the network of old lanes off the symbolically-named English and Scotch Streets has been reprieved, and recently the medieval tithe-barn was restored and reopened as a centre for cultural activities; old or new, a city is there to be used, and if there is one thing Carlisle has always been, it is well-used.

The sixteenth-century Borderers respected it, and the reivers tended to give it a wide berth. Although its official garrison was often inadequate—in 1595 it was discovered that the city’s master gunner was a butcher living in Suffolk, and that there was no one in the town fit to fire a cannon—it was an effective police base, and the West March Warden and his officers, with their outposts near the frontier, were an ever-present danger to marauders.

1. Sir John Carey (1556?–1617), one of a notable family of Border officers, as at various times Governor of Berwick, chamberlain of the town, Warden of the English East March and Captain of Norham. His letters and reports throw important light on affairs of the eastern Border, and on the work of Wardens and other officers. He was much given to indignant complaint. He will be frequently quoted in this book, along with his father, Lord Hunsdon, and younger brother Robert, both prominent Border officials.

2. William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–98), principal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and the leading English statesman of the day.

3. Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (1525–96), father of John and Robert Carey, was a Warden of the English East March (and briefly in the Middle March). A powerful figure in Border affairs, although latterly often absent from his post, he was probably a bastard of Henry VIII’s. Tough, bluff, brave and blunt-spoken, Hunsdon’s “custom of swearing and obscenity in speaking made him seem a worse Christian than he was.”

4. Considering that it was alive with thieves and ruffians, the Border country was surprisingly short of prisons. One later English Warden, Ralph Eure, found that Hexham jail was so unfit for habitation “that I am forced to pasture myne own house with such men as are of the better sort.”

5. Hot trod—lawful pursuit of reivers.

6. The question which of the two English Marches, West or Middle, sustained the greater damage from raiding, is highly debatable. William Bowes once estimated the spoils in the West as being twice as great as those in the Middle and East combined, but the statistics as a whole are contradictory, and relate only to a comparatively short period of Border history. One thing seems likely, on the evidence, and that is that the Cumbrian riders did more damage to Scotland than they suffered in return.

V
“A martial kind of men”

It is impossible to say how many people lived in the sixteenth-century Borderland, but a rough idea may be given. D. L. W. Tough made an ingenious calculation based on the muster rolls of the English Marches in 1584;¹ these were supposed to include every man between 16 and 60, and by taking this age group to be a certain proportion of the whole, Tough was able to arrive at a figure of about 120,000 as the total population of the English Border. Checking against later census figures seemed to confirm his estimate, and for what it is worth it is interesting to make comparison with known populations in our own time.

In 1959 there were 45 million people in England and Wales; four centuries earlier, as nearly as can be estimated, there were about 45 million—a tenth of the modern figure. In 1959 there were 1,170,600 persons in Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, and a tenth of that gives a 1559 population of 117,000, which is very close to Tough’s figure. Of course, this is a questionable calculation, but it is probably the best we can do.

Scotland is more difficult, because information is even scarcer than for England. Tough got as close as he could by making comparison with early nineteenth-century figures, and assuming a total Scottish population in 1600 of 600,000, arrived at a figure for the Scottish Borders of almost 45,000.

If this figure is subjected to the 1959 comparison, as we have done for England, it does not appear to stand up. Here it is:

In 1959 the population of Scotland was 5 million; in 1559, by reasonable deduction, it was possibly about half a million—one-tenth, as in the case of England. But the Scottish Border population in 1959 was 192,836, and one-tenth of that gives only 19,000 people in 1559, which is less than half of the 45,000 Tough estimated for 1600.

There is a possible explanation, and it tends to confirm Tough’s higher figure. Thanks to urban development in places like the Newcastle area, Carlisle, and the Cumbrian west coast, the population of the English Marches has probably kept pace over the centuries with the growth of England as a whole. But we may be sure that the Scottish Border has not kept pace with total Scottish growth; it has had no urban development like that of Northern England. So it is reasonable to assume that Scottish Border population has declined proportionately, and that the 1559 population figure would in fact be much higher than a straightforward comparison with 1959 suggests. Seen in this light Tough’s 45,000 seems reasonable—indeed, he himself wondered if it was not too low.

If we take 120,000 English and 50,000 Scots as the sixteenth-century Border population we are probably not far off the mark. And while we lack accurate figures, there are some facts obtainable; a document of November 1596 states categorically that the English West and Middle Marches far outnumber their Scottish opposites. It adds that the English East March is smaller and weaker than either of the others by “two-thirds at least”, and points out that the Scottish East and Middle Marches together contain 400 villages and steads, while the English East March has only 120. This loaded comparison indicates that the English East March felt itself very much the prey of the two Scottish Marches (see also Chapter XII).

But if there is doubt about the Borders’ numerical population, there is none about what kind of people they were. Visiting contemporaries as well as local sources are emphatic. Barbarous, crafty, vengeful, crooked, quarrelsome, tough, perverse, active, deceitful—there is a harmony about the adjectives to be found in travellers’ descriptions and official letters. In general it is conceded that the Borderers, English and Scottish, were much alike, that they made excellent soldiers if disciplined, but that the raw material was hard, wild, and ill to tame.

The younger Surrey,² the great English veteran who led the van at Flodden when England inflicted the heaviest defeat in Scottish history, was in no doubt about the Scottish Borderers. To him they were “the boldest men, and the hottest, that ever I saw any nation”. Froissart, writing from an earlier period, but again out of a knowledge that was Border-based, thought both Scots and English “good men of war, for when they meet there is a hard fight without sparing: there is no ‘Ho!’ between them as long as spears, swords, axes, or daggers will endure, but lay on each upon other”. How right he was; of course, he and Surrey were looking at the Borderers as soldiers, but on the frontier the line between civil and military was often ill-defined, even in peace-time.

Camden found the Borderers hard, like their country. “In the wastes … you may see as it were the ancient nomads, a martial kind of men who, from the month of April into August, lie out scattering and summering with their cattle, in little cottages here and there, which they call sheils and sheilings.” He could not survey the Roman Wall as closely as he wished “for the rank robbers thereabout”.

Camden knew the Scots West Marchmen as “infamous for robberies”; his view is balanced by the account of the English Middle March in 1549, from the Chorographia:

“The chief [dales] are Tynedale and Redesdale, a country that William the Conqueror did not subdue, retaining to this day the ancient laws and customs. These Highlanders are famous for thieving; they are all bred up and live by theft. They come down from these dales into the low countries, and carry away horses and cattle so cunningly, that it will be hard for any to get them or their cattle, except they be acquainted with some master thief, who for some money may help them to their stolen goods, or deceive them.”

Probably the fullest contemporary description of sixteenth-century Border life is that given by Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who will be more fully quoted in the chapter on reiving technique. He was a close student of social matters, and for the Scottish side at least, his account is the best obtainable.

The Borderers, he writes, “assume to themselves the greatest habits of licence.… For as, in time of war, they are readily reduced to extreme poverty by the almost daily inroads of the enemy, so, on the restoration of peace, they entirely neglect to cultivate their lands, though fertile, from the fear of the fruits of their labour being immediately destroyed by a new war. Whence it happens that they seek their subsistence by robberies, or rather by plundering and rapine, for they are particularly averse to the shedding of blood; nor do they much concern themselves whether it be from Scots or English that they rob and plunder.”

Leslie has a good deal to say of the characters of the Borderers, and it is not all bad. He is the main authority for the myth that they were reluctant to kill, except in feud; he also maintained “that having once pledged their faith, even to an enemy, they are very strict in observing it, insomuch that they think nothing can be more heinous than violated fidelity.”

In theory, possibly, but this is one of those hallowed Border legends which requires close examination. There was certainly in the sixteenth century a Border code of honour, a kind of hangover from the days of Percy and Douglas, recognised and referred to and in some ways respected. Robert Carey³ wrote to Cecil⁴ of Scottish gentlemen who “will rather lose their lives and livings, than go back from their word, and break the custom of the Border”. The last phrase is significant. One of Ralph Sadler’s⁵ English spies said the Scots had no scruples about stealing, “and yet they would not bewray any man that trust in them for all the gold in Scotland and France.” According to Leslie, to be publicly reproached a proven faith-breaker was a greater punishment “even than an honourable death inflicted on the guilty person”.

These are flat, general statements, and they obviously have some basis. But they do not accord with the written records of Border life, with their long catalogues of broken assurances, unredeemed pledges, and the like. If one studies the lives of, say, John Forster⁶ and John Maxwell,⁷ it may not be possible to prove either of them liars, but there can be no doubt that lies were being told by someone, profusely and persistently. Sir William Bowes⁸ despaired of the Scots, “that both can and will say more for a falsehoode, than for my own part I can doe for the truth”, and John Carey thought them “the most crafty and deceitful” on earth. Many of his fellow-officials agreed. The necessity of repeated Border legislation to deal with perjury does not speak for a truthful populace.

It is sometimes argued that Border law could not have been based on good faith and truth-telling if these had not been the norm. This is to miss the point. The law was so based because there was no alternative in a fairly primitive and unusual society. Good faith was an ideal, then as now, and it was recognised, but that doesn’t mean it was universally observed. Study of the written facts suggests that the Borderers were no more truthful or reliable than other men; they had their own eccentric notions of honour, but stainless veracity was not essential to it in practice. Bishop Leslie no doubt had good reason for his opinion, but the records appear to contradict him. Still, there will always be those eager to accept his view of the Borderers; personally, I wouldn’t have trusted them round the corner.

Breaking a promise is one thing; deliberate betrayal and treachery are rather different, and it is said that these were uncommon. It is difficult to judge at this distance, but again a study of the records makes one cautious about accepting blanket statements. Hector of Harlaw, the Carleton brothers, Black Ormiston, and Richie Graham will be mentioned later; their behaviour provides food for thought on the subject.

Leslie is interesting on Border morality as applied to property and theft. “They have a persuasion that all property is common by the law of nature, and is therefore liable to be appropriated by them in their necessity.” Later he adds: “Besides, they think the art of plundering so very lawful, that they never say over their prayers more fervently, or have more devout recurrence to their beads and their rosaries, than when they have made an expedition.”

Sometimes one gets the impression that the good bishop secretly admired the Border reivers. At least he is careful to do them justice, and there may be a clue to his attitude in that passage where he notes approvingly: “Nor indeed have the Borderers, with such ready frenzy as many others of the country, joined the heretical secession from the common faith of the holy church.” Rascals they might be, but Leslie counted them among his flock. Possibly he had not heard the story of the visitor to Liddesdale who, finding no churches, demanded: “Are there no Christians here?” and received the reply, “Na, we’s a’ Elliots and Armstrangs.”

Apart from the spiritual side, we know some other things about the old Border character. One has to remember, in quoting travellers’ stories, that most of those who visited Scotland, for example, wrote of the country as a whole, and what they described may not hold good for the Marches. But Pope Pius II, who visited the country in his earlier years when he was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, made observations which are pertinent; he noted the generally poor condition of the country, and that the men were small, bold and forward in temper, while the women, “fair in complexion, comely and pleasing” were “not distinguished for their chastity, giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands”.

This was in the fifteenth century; fifty years later Pedro de Ayala, a Spaniard, found the women “courteous in the extreme … really honest, though very bold”. He thought they dressed better than English women, and were in absolute control of their houses.

Several writers testify to a boastful tendency in the Scots, and Sylvius noted that nothing pleased them more than to hear the English abused. An English physician who lived in Scotland in the 1540s found that it was not in nature for a Scot to love an Englishman, and we have plenty of evidence of mutual loathing on either side. John Carey thought the Scots “the most perverst and prowde nacion in the world”, and paid them a back-handed compliment: whoever found himself up against them, the Scots were “such a people as will soon find what is in him.”

Eure,⁹ an English Warden, said of his own Marchmen that they “envied the stranger”; outsiders were not welcomed on either side of the line, as many of the later English Wardens, who were not Borderers, found to their cost. But one learns to be cautious about accepting some of the English officials’ strictures on the Borderers at their full face value; they were doubtless sincere, but they were under severe pressures in their office, and in writing to London they tended to give full vent to their feelings. One detects a fine rising note of hysteria in John Carey’s correspondence, and in that of Eure, who never found his feet as a Warden. Henry Leigh, a lesser official, once observed, with feeling, that the Borderers “were no cripples of their tongues”; neither were their Wardens.

A marked characteristic of the Marchmen, seemingly at odds with Anglo-Scottish rivalry, was their peculiar sense of community which made the Borderland an entity. Over and above inter-marriage and blood kinship, there was a common heritage that seemed to unite English and Scot on the Border against the outside world; they under stood each other and, to use a modern cliché, shared common problems. C. P. Snow touched in one of his novels on the phenomenon of two enemies who felt somehow closer to each other than to their own supporters, and this was true of the Border people. At its extreme this feeling manifested itself in one English invasion, when English and Scottish Borderers, on opposite sides as part of their national armies, were seen talking to each other “within less than a spear’s length, but when aware that such intercourse was noticed, they commenced to run at each other, apparently with no desire to inflict serious injury.”¹⁰

Often to English Wardens it seemed that their subjects were more at home with Scottish Borderers than with other Englishmen—usually for profit. The bond, created by geography, by common social conditions, and by a shared spirit of lawless independence, was a paradox that intermarriage strengthened. It has never entirely disappeared.

The tribal system, sometimes called clanship, also helped to foster it. Family unity as much as anything made the Borders and set them apart. Despite the feudal system, tribal loyalty was paramount; Scott noted that no matter what the family’s origin, Saxon, Norman, or Celtic, clanship persisted and was too strong for the government. “No Prince but a Percy” was a Northumberland saying, and on the English side the power of the local chieftain was a continuing matter of concern to London, especially when the Catholic North became a menace to the Reformed state. On both sides the chief of the tribe was the man who mattered; in England “the inhabitants acted less under the direction of their landlords than under that of the principal man of their name”. In Scotland clanship was recognised by a government that could do nothing about it anyway; the chiefs were to find pledges for keeping good order by the clan, just as landlords had to take responsibility for their tenants.

There is a tendency to think of clanship as a peculiarly Scottish thing, but it is evident that on the Border the tie of tribal blood was no stronger among the Kerrs and Scotts and Armstrongs of Scotland than among the Forsters, Ogles, Fenwicks, Charltons, Halls, and Musgraves of England.

And if it was not easy to be a chief or a landlord over such people, it was even harder to be a central government whose claims to loyalty and obedience were feeble by comparison. What member of the Scott family needed Edinburgh’s protection—or approval—when he had Buccleuch’s?

No doubt the clan system contributed to the poverty and economic decline of the Borders, as well as to their backwardness. Greedy overlords were a cause of decay, and so was overpopulation of the dales, which drove men out to steal. Poverty has perhaps been over-emphasised as a root cause of Border reiving, but it was certainly a spur. The oft-quoted phenomenon of Tynedale, where a deceased’s land must be divided equally among all his sons, “whereby beggars increase and service decays” was rightly a matter for reform in Eure’s eyes.

1. The Last Years of a Frontier, pp. 26–8.

2. Thomas Howard the younger (1474?–1554), Earl of Surrey and later Duke of Norfolk (1524). Fought in Spain, 1512; Lord High Admiral of England, 1513–25; Earl Marshal of England, 1533. An experienced Border fighter, he suppressed the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. Uncle of Anne Boleyn.

3. Sir Robert Carey (1560–1639), was at different times Warden of the English East and Middle Marches, and also served in a subordinate capacity in the West March. Clever, brave, and something of a beau sabreur, he is one of the few Borderers to have left memoirs of his activities.

4. Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612), third son of Lord Burghley, was Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State from 1596, although in effect he had been holding the post for some years before that. He worked hard to secure the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Created Earl of Salisbury, 1605.

5. Sir Ralph Sadler, English Ambassador to Scotland in the middle of the sixteenth century.

6. Sir John Forster (1501?–1602), an extraordinary English Borderer, held the Middle March Wardenship for almost thirty-five years, with only one brief break. He was over 100 when he died, having lived almost exactly through the sixteenth century, and seen every aspect of Border life. No one was more experienced or sunk in frontier affairs than Forster; unfortunately, although he was outstandingly brave, his honesty was seldom out of question.

7. Sir John Maxwell (1512?–1583), later Lord Herries, had a highly chequered career, during which he held the Scottish West March Wardenship five times.

8. Sir William Bowes, a treasurer of Berwick and a commissioner for Border affairs in the 1590s. There was a large family of Boweses, of whom the most famous was the earlier Sir Robert Bowes, who was Warden of the English East and Middle Marches in the 1540s, “a most expert Borderer”, and author of “Forme and Order of a Day of Truce”. A later Robert Bowes was Elizabeth’s ambassador to Scotland.

9. Ralph, 3rd Lord Eure (1538–1617) was English Middle March Warden from 1595–98, and had a hard time of it. Like some other Wardens, he failed to live up to the reputation of distinguished ancestors—in his case, his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been Wardens. The great-grandfather, Sir William Eure, 1st Lord, had the East March in the 1530s and 1540s; his son, Sir Ralph Eure, held the Middle March in the 1540s, was notorious for his cruel raids in Scotland, and was finally killed at Ancrum Moor (1545)—he was the father of the 2nd Lord Eure, who was Middle March Warden in the 1550s and died in 1594. Confusion occasionally arises because of the various ways of spelling the name, which also appears as Eurie, Ewerie, Ewer, and Evers. Whenever “Eure” is quoted in this book the person referred to is Ralph, 3rd Lord, unless otherwise stated.

10. Scott, quoting Patten’s account of Somerset’s expedition into Scotland.

VI
Food and shelter

The tribal system, and the eternal turbulence of the frontier, dictated the day-to-day living of the people. Camden spoke of nomads; as such, the Borderers tended to live on mobile beasts rather than on standing crops. They ate beef and broth in quantity, and some mutton: “they live chiefly on flesh, milk and boiled barley”, says Leslie, while Sylvius gives a diet of fish and flesh, with bread only as a dainty. Pedro de Ayala mentions immense flocks of sheep¹ in the wilder parts, and the lack of crop cultivation.

Leslie noted that not only was use of bread very limited, but that the Borderers took very little beer² or wine. Indeed, they seem to have been abstemious enough, although according to a document giving the number of taverns in the English Border in 1571, the inhabitants of the Middle March must have had a pub for every 46 people or thereabouts, and Berwick the same proportion. But drunkenness is seldom mentioned in Border records, with such notable exceptions as the six Scots reivers whom John Carey captured drunk at an inn, and Sir John Forster’s bastard son and deputy, “wan that is so given over to drunkennes, that if he cannot get companey, he will sit in a chayre in his chamber and drinke himself drunke before he reise!”

Leslie was talking about the rural Borderers when he mentioned the absence of bread, which was commoner in the cities, larger houses, and garrisons.³ An English traveller who stayed in the home of a Border knight in 1598 (it may have been Branxholm, the hold of Buccleuch), observed that “they commonly eat hearth cakes of oats” (the cakes or cracknels of which Froissart talks), and although he was entertained “after their best manner” he found “no art of cookery or household stuff, but rude neglect of both”. His account of a meal-time in the hold of a Border chieftain is so detailed that it is worth quoting at greater length:

“Many servants brought in the meat, with blue caps on their heads, the table being more than half furnished with great platters of porridge, each having a little sodden meat. When the table was served, the servants sat down with us; but the upper mess instead of porridge, had a pullet with some prunes in the broth. The Scots, living then in factions, used to keep many followers and so consumed their revenues in victuals, and were always in want of money.”

However, he found them hospitable to strangers, the city folk entertaining “passengers on acquaintance”.

The agricultural system of the Borderers, peaceful and lawless alike, followed a regular pattern. From autumn to spring, when the nights were long, was the season for raiding; the summer months were for husbandry, and although raiding occurred then also, it was less systematic. Tillage took place in spring and summer, and the crops were mainly oats, rye, and barley, but the main effort went into cattle and sheep raising. For this the rural Borderer had to be mobile, leaving his winter dwelling about April to move into the “hielands” where he lived in his sheiling for the next four or five months while the cattle pastured.

Although the sheiling communities were safer than the winter quarters, they were not immune from the reivers. Their inaccessibility cut both ways, for if it made raiding more difficult it also placed the herdsmen farther from the protection of the Warden forces. Eure wrote to Burghley at the start of the 1597 summering to complain that he could not defend the Middle March sheilings “without I have 100 foot from Berwick to lie during the summer with them for defence.” In that season at least the Scots were hitting the sheilings harder than usual, so that Eure found his people were reluctant to venture out summering, “which is their chiefest profitt”.

Following this system of transhumance was easier for people who were not accustomed to build houses for permanence, and who had learned from generations of warfare and raiding to live on the hoof. Even their winter quarters were often makeshift affairs that could be put up in a matter of hours. They were fashioned of clay, or of stones when they were available, and sometimes of turf sods, with roofs of thatch or turf. Most of the isolated holdings would be of this type, “huts and cottages” as Leslie says, “about the burning of which they are nowise concerned”. It was easy enough to build another, and Sir Robert Bowes described in 1546 how “if such cottages or cabins where they dwell in be bront of one day they will the next day maik other and not remove from the ground”.

In the larger villages there was more effort at permanence, with sturdy stone houses and walls, and in Tynedale and on the Scottish side there were some “very stronge houses” constructed of massive baulks of oak bound hard together and “so thycke mortressed that yt wilbe very harde, without greatt force and lasoure, to break or caste [them] downe”. By lining the walls and roofs thickly with turf the builders went some way towards fire-proofing these block-houses; Ill Will Armstrong’s house in the Scottish West March was “buylded after siche a maner that it couth not be brynt ne distroyed, unto it was cut downe with axes”.

The next stage up from the wooden block-house was the peel tower, many of which can still be seen all over the Border. An excellent example is Smailholm, near Kelso, or Hollows Tower on the Esk, which are rather de luxe models, but show exactly the purpose which the peel tower served.

The peel was built of stone, with walls of massive thickness, and ideally was three or four storeys high. The only entrance was through a double door at ground level, one of the doors being an outer iron grating, and the other of oak reinforced with iron. The bottom storey was used as a store room, and the floors above were reached by a narrow curving stair, called a turnpike, usually going up clockwise so that a defender retreating up the flight had his unguarded left side to the wall, and his sword arm to the outside; his attacker, coming up, was at the disadvantage of having his sword arm to the wall. Tradition has it that the Kerrs, who were notoriously left-handed,⁴ built their stairs anti-clockwise.

The upper floors were the living quarters, and at the very top there would usually be a beacon, to summon help in attack or give warning of an impending foray.

The peel was normally a chief’s house, and no matter how rich or powerful a Border leader might become he needed a tower at least for his personal safety and to provide a rallying point and defensive centre for his dependants. Their great virtue was their simplicity and strength; they were impervious to fire from the outside, or indeed to anything short of artillery or a sustained siege. Once inside, with the doors shut, the defenders could hold out against a greatly superior force, firing from the arrow-slits and shot-holes, and hurling down interesting objects from the roof. Even when the doors were forced, determined men could fight from floor to floor.

The situation of the towers varied. Sometimes a dwelling house was attached, and normally the chief’s immediate family and dependants, sometimes in large numbers, would live in and around the fortress. The peel might be surrounded by a large wall, known as a barmekin or barnekin; by statute of 1535 Scottish leaders on the Border were obliged to build them to regulation size, over two feet thick and between seven and eight feet high. The barnekin offered a refuge for people and cattle, and a defensible perimeter against minor attacks.

Even when he had to abandon his peel in the face of a large invasion, and retire to the wastes or mosses with his folk and goods, the Borderer had an ingenious way of preventing its destruction in his absence. The interior of the peel would be stuffed tight with smouldering peat, which would burn for days, and made it impossible for gunpowder charges to be laid, or for the attackers to get inside and set to work with crowbars and axes. When the Borderer found it safe to return he would have to renew and repair his woodwork, but the framework of his tower would be little the worse for wear.

There were methods of capturing a peel tower, one of which is described in detail by a reiver in Chapter XV. The Bold Buccleuch’s⁵ method, described by young Scrope,⁶ of “fyre to the door” whereby the defenders were smoked out, was probably common practice, especially when attackers had succeeded in capturing the ground floor and driving the defenders upstairs. Another ingenious method was used by Robert Carey in attacking a Graham peel: “we set presently at worke to get up to the top of the tower and to uncover the roofe, and then some 20 of [the besiegers] to fall down together, and by that means to win the tower”.

Carey was fairly new to the frontier at that time, and since the redoubtable Thomas Carleton, an officer of great experience, was at his elbow throughout the operation, we can guess whose bright idea it was to remove the roof.

The towers and block-houses were no doubt comparatively comfortable places, and decently if crudely furnished, although there was a total absence of such refinements as carpets or decorations, but the peasant huts and sheilings were primitive in the extreme. Heat was by peat fire, probably in the centre of the floor; the clothing, like the furniture, was of the simplest. “The husbandmen in Scotland, the servants, and almost all the country wore coarse cloth made at home of grey or sky colour, and flat blue caps very broad,” says our English traveller.⁷ The heads of tribes and leading landowners on both sides might use satin, silk, damask, lace, and taffeta, but among the poorer folk leather and buckskin for the men, and broadcloth, linen and woollens for both sexes were the common dress materials.

We get some idea of clothing and household goods among the Borderers from the lists of goods stolen in raids. These vary from the sumptuous apparel lifted from Robert Kerr of Ancrum, including fine hats and dresses, feather beds and plate, to the crude kitchen utensils of the peasants. An inventory of goods stolen from a servant of John Forster’s in 1590 is an interesting guide to the possessions of a “middle class” Borderer. It includes two doublets, two pairs of breeches, a cloak, a jerkin, a woman’s kirtle and pair of sleeves, nine kerchiefs, seven rails (shifts), five pairs of linen sheets, two coverlets, two linen shirts, a purse containing six shillings, another purse, two silk ribbons, a winding cloth, a feather bed, three shirts, a cauldron, and so on. Not a badly furnished establishment; Forster’s servant could obviously afford to spend money on his wife’s appearance—which is mentioned elsewhere as a common Border trait.⁸

Within the towns conditions were somewhat different; Carlisle and Berwick were sophisticated by the standards of the rural communities, and on paper differed from southern towns only in that they were garrisoned and heavily defended. On the Scottish side, towns like Dumfries, Annan, Jedburgh, and Kelso were strong, organised communities, usually walled and fortified, run by their own councillors, and often containing houses of some strength. They were sturdily independent folk, quick to resent interference by rural potentates; Jedburgh especially, which carried on a feud with the Kerrs of Ferniehurst, was noted for the toughness of its inhabitants.

The standard of living was generally higher in the towns, as one would expect. A man in the Berwick garrison, in 1597, when times were hard and inflation had increased rapidly,⁹ got a daily ration of a twelve-ounce loaf, three pints of beer, one-and-a-half pounds of beef, three-quarters of a pound of cheese, and a quarter of a pound of butter—this was a considerable reduction in what his ration had been some years earlier.

What is interesting about the Berwick garrison’s rations is that they do not seem to have been markedly better off than the civilians—at least they could not afford the strong beer which apparently found a ready civil market. Nor was their food always considered satisfactory; John Carey bluntly told Burghley on one occasion that it was not fit for a horse.

1. Sheep-raising in the sixteenth century was primarily for wool production, not for mutton, but Border wool was considered of poor quality. The demand for mutton increased gradually from Elizabeth’s reign onwards.

2. The better classes in the towns brewed ale, which was their “usual drink”.

3. The garrison of the fortress of Roxburgh laid in 1800 loaves among the winter’s victuals in 1548.

4. A left-handed person is still called ker-handed, car-handed, or corry-fisted in the Scottish Borderland.

5. There were many Walter Scotts of Branxholm and Buccleuch, the principal ones being that Walter Scott who fought at Flodden and Ancrum, was briefly Middle March Warden, and was murdered by the Kerrs in 1552; and his grandson, the “Bold Buccleuch” (1565–1611), a noted reiver who was also Keeper of Liddesdale from 1594–1603, and who is famous for his rescue of Kinmont Willie Armstrong from Carlisle in 1596. When Buccleuch is mentioned in this text it means the grandson, unless otherwise stated.

6. Henry and Thomas Scrope (or Scroop) were respectively 9th and 10th Lords Scrope of Bolton. Henry (1534–1592) was English West March Warden from 1563 until his death; his son, Thomas (1567?–1600) held the office from 1592 to 1603. Henry was an able Warden, Thomas much less so (he was the unlucky victim of the Kinmont raid). To avoid confusion, they are referred to in the text as old Scrope and young Scrope where necessary.

7. He also noted that Scottish gentlemen wore little extra adornment by way of lace, and tended to follow French fashion as to cut. Married gentle-women wore “close upper bodices after the German fashion with large whalebone sleeves after the French; short cloaks like the Germans, French hoods and large falling bands about their necks. The unmarried of all sorts go bare-headed and wear short cloaks like the virgins of Germany. The lower sort of citizens’ wives and the women of the country wore cloaks made of a coarse stuff of two or three colours in checker work vulgarly called pladden”.

8. de Ayala, in 1498, thought Scotswomen had the handsomest headdresses in the world, but omitted to describe them.

9. Wheat had doubled in price, and meat and butter gone up by 30%.

VII
The riding surnames

It is significant that in the sixteenth-century Borderland the words “road” and “raid” were synonymous. So were “raiding” and “riding”—when the Armstrongs, for example, were described as “ever riding”, it meant simply that they never ceased from foraying. So when one speaks of the riding surnames, the phrase covers those families who were the principal reivers.

Any list of them must be selective, and what follows is not a comprehensive roll, but a brief and general guide to the main riding tribes, with some of the smaller surnames added because they are of particular interest. It should be remembered that the names are not chosen for national or political importance, but for their prominence in the limited sphere of frontier reiving; thus the Douglases and Percies, famous families who were active in the early days of Border warfare, are omitted, because they were hardly riding families, while the Burns and Storeys, comparatively unimportant in any national sense, are included because they were active forayers.

Similarly, the personalities mentioned have been chosen only for their Border interest—e.g. Richie of Brackenhill is not a shining light in the roll of the whole Graham family, which includes people like Montrose and Claverhouse, but he was a Borderer and they were not.

In listing twenty-one tribes I have simply given their names, with some of their alternative spellings where appropriate; then their main areas of occupation (it will be noted that some of them lived on both sides of the frontier) and principal Border branches; a short comment; a selection of some noteworthy individuals, and a final line indicating the status and numbers of the family in the Border country today.

ARMSTRONG

(Armstrang)

Principally Scottish, but probably of Cumbrian origin, Liddesdale, DL¹, Eskdale, Annandale, EWM, SEM. Chief branches, Mangerton, Whithaugh, Calfhills, etc.

The name means literally what it says (cf. Fortinbras), and the Armstrongs were the most feared and dangerous riding clan on the whole frontier. As Satchells put it:

On the Border was the Armstrongs, able men,

Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame.

In Johnnie Armstrong’s day (c. 1528) they could put 3000 men into the saddle, and probably did more damage by foray than any other two families combined, both in England and Scotland. Frequently allied themselves with England.

Notables: Johnnie Armstrong, Kinmont Willie Armstrong, Sim the Laird (c. 1528), Ill Will Armstrong, Sandie (his son), Old Sim of Mangerton, the Laird’s Jock (c. 1587), Dick of Dryhope, Jock of the Side (c. 1570), Lance of Whithaugh, et al., et al.

Still numerous in Cumberland.

BELL

English and Scottish. Gilsland, SWM, Annandale.

A “great surname” of the West March, active in raiding and feud, and particularly hostile to the Grahams. One theory about the name is that it originally signified good looks.

Notables: Willie Redcloak, Christopher Bell.

Very common today.

BURN

(Bourne)

Scottish. East Teviotdale.

A most predatory and vicious family of the Middle March, whose raids and murders reached a peak in the 1590s, when they were operating under the protection of Robert Kerr of Cessford. They were perhaps the worst of that East Teviotdale fraternity of whom Robert Carey wrote that to cross them was to provoke a sanguinary feud—for example, they are reckoned to have killed seventeen Collingwoods in revenge for the death of one man of their own.

Notables: Geordie Burn, Jock and Ralph of the Coate, Charlie and Mark of Elisheuch.

Fairly common today.

CHARLTON

(Carleton)

English, although in its alternate form the name appears in southwestern Scotland also. Tynedale.

The Charltons were one of the hardiest and most intractable families on the English side, and were alternately allied to and at feud with the Scottish tribes in the west. Latterly they were engaged in a bitter vendetta with the Scotts of Buccleuch. Although Carleton is another form of the name, the Cumbrian Carletons had no alliance or association with the Tynedale Charltons.

Notables: Lionel of Thornburgh, John of the Bower, Thomas of Hawcop.

Still in Northumberland.

CROSER

(Crosar, Crozier)

Mainly Scottish. Upper Liddesdale, Teviotdale, but also in Bewcastle where in 1592 they were “sore decaied”. Chief branch, Riccarton.

A small but hard-riding family, often associated with Nixons and Elliots, and like them often allied with England. Frequently lumped under such descriptives as “theeves of Scotland” and “loose men”.

Notables: Ill Wild Will Croser, “Nebless” (Noseless) Clemmie, Martin’s Clemmie.

Much dispersed.

ELLIOT

(Elwood—see note)

Scottish, possibly of east coast origin. Liddesdale, Teviotdale, Ewesdale. Chief branches, Redheuch (whose chief was Keeper of Hermitage Castle), Lariston, Steile, Park, etc.

The second family of Liddesdale, and although less numerous than the Armstrongs, with whom they were frequently allied, they were as predatory as any clan on the frontier. Occasionally under English protection, they received a subsidy from Elizabeth during their feud with the Scotts.

Notables: Martin Elliot of Braidley (“a very wise and stout fellawe”), Little Jock of the Park, Robin of Redheuch, Archie “Fire the Braes”, William of Lariston, Martin’s Gibb.

[Note—A curiosity about the name Elliot is that there are more than seventy ways of spelling it, from Aylewood to Ilwand, and Dalliot to Ellot (which was the form most commonly used on the Border, along with Elwood). Any permutation of l’s and t’s is said to be permissible except Elliott, which for some reason the family affect to despise. The old rhyme says:

The double L and single T

Descend from Minto and Wolflee,

The double T and single L

Mark the old race in Stobs that dwell,

The single L and single T

The Eliots of St Germains be,

But double T and double L

Who they are, nobody can tell.]

Numerous today on the Scottish side.

FENWICK

English. EMM.

A powerful English family, described as “gentlemen”, and often to be found among Border officials. They conducted many feuds, including a bitter one with the Liddesdale Elliots.

Notables: William of Wallington; William, Keeper of Tynedale; Richard Fenwick of Stanton.

Numerous in north-east England.

FORSTER

(Forrester, Foster)

Largely English. EEM, EWM (Line, Bewcastle), Liddesdale.

A large but not closely-knit family, the Forsters were to be found virtually everywhere on the English side. The Scottish Forsters intermarried with England, and the English Forsters were noted for their alliance with the Humes.

Notables: Sir John Forster, Red Rowy, Rowy’s Will.

Widespread today.

GRAHAM

(Graeme)

Mostly English (so far as Border history goes), but notoriously ready to be on either side. Originally Scottish, and famous outside the Border area. EWM, SWM, DL.

Apart from the Armstrongs, the Grahams were probably the most troublesome family on the frontier. Their dual allegiances caused confusion, and they were cordially detested by their own English authorities. At one time the most numerous family in the West Border, with 500 riders in 13 towers in 1552, they were savagely persecuted in the reign of James VI and I.

Notables: Richie of Brackenhill, Jock of the Peartree, Young Hutcheon, Richie’s Will, Will’s Jock, et al, et al.

Highly numerous in Cumberland.

HALL

English and Scottish. Redesdale, Liddesdale, E. Teviotdale.

A large, widely-spread clan, at one time the most powerful in Redesdale, the Halls were well-hated and feared on both sides. (In the Redesdale hunting incident in 1598 the Scottish Halls and the Rutherfords were allegedly singled out by English officers as two surnames to whom no quarter should be given.) However, the Scottish Halls appear to have been much intermarried with English tribes.

Notables: Eddie Hall, “the famous thief”, George of Burdupp (who had served with Philip Sidney in the Low Countries), Will of Heavyside, and two Jameses, father and son, both of Heavyside.

Numerous on both sides today.

HETHERINGTON

(Hetherton, Atherton)

English. Hethersgill, Line river, and EWM frontier.

A Norse family (Hetherings or Hoderings), they were “a disordered surname”, although not active raiders. Frequently mentioned in connection with blackmail, both receiving and paying. Deeply involved in plot to murder Bishop of Carlisle, 1569.

Notables: Thomas “the Merchant”, blackmailer; George of Walton.

Still in North Cumberland.

HUME

(Home)

Scottish. SEM.

A great name in Scottish and Border history, the Humes achieved one extraordinary distinction as the only frontier family who would claim continuous domination in their own March. They usually held the Scottish East Wardenship, and although frequently in trouble with the Crown they never lost their eminence and influence.

Notables: Alexander, 3rd Lord Hume (c. Flodden); Alexander, 5th Lord; Alexander, 6th Lord; James Hume of Coldenknowes.

Still numerous.

IRVINE

(Irving, Urwen)

Scottish. SWM, Annandale, Lower Eskdale.

A very tough bunch indeed, the Irvines contributed much to the general disorder, despite their comparatively small numbers. Thoroughly involved in all the West March mischief.

Notables: Willie Kang, and his brothers Davy and Geordie.

Widespread.

JOHNSTONE

(Johnston, Johnstoun)

Scottish, but possibly of English origin. SWM.

Second only to the Maxwells in their March, the Johnstones were powerful reivers and also frequent Wardens. Their feud with the Maxwells was the longest and bloodiest in Border history. The “t” in their name sets them apart from other “sons of John”, although even on the Border it was often dropped, and a famous grandson of the clan, Ben Jonson the poet, deliberately adopted his own spelling to avoid being confused with other Johnstons and Johnsons in London. (A very clan-conscious man, Ben walked all the way to Scotland to visit his ancestors’ territory.)

Notables: James Johnstone, victor of Dryfe, and his father, John Johnstone.

Numerous and widespread.

KERR

(Ker, Carr, Carre)

Scottish, although there are many English Carrs nowadays. SMM, East Teviotdale, Liddesdale. Chief branches Cessford, Ferniehurst.

The Kerrs were, with the possible exception of the Scotts, the leading tribe of the Scottish Middle March, which they frequently ruled as Wardens. However, no family was more active in reiving. The Cessford and Ferniehurst branches were continual rivals.

Notables: Robert of Cessford (c. 1590), Thomas of Ferniehurst, Dand Kerr.

[Not the smallest controversy about the Kerrs concerns the pronunciation of their name. Modern Scots made it sound almost like “care”, or the first syllable of “merry”. To the northern English it is “cur”, while the affected render it as “car”, which, strangely enough, is how the ordinary Elizabethan Borderers pronounced it.]

Strongly represented today.

MAXWELL

Scottish. SWM, Annandale.

The strongest family in the Scottish West March, until the Johnstones reduced their power late in the sixteenth century. As often as not a Maxwell was Warden, and their name runs steadily through Border and Scottish history. Deeply involved with the English in the 1540s.

Notables: Johnny Maxwell (4th Lord Herries), John, 8th Lord Maxwell.

Strong in SWM today.

MUSGRAVE

English. EWM.

A powerful family of Cumberland who had a long record of service to the English Crown, both as soldiers and March officers. This did not inhibit their extra-legal activities, and one suspects that they often used their offices to cover their raiding. One of the two “greatest names” of the West Wardenry (the other was Salkeld) the Musgraves were constantly at feud on the Scottish side, and had a three-century vendetta with their fellow-Cumbrians, the Dacres.

Notables: Thomas Musgrave, Captain of Bewcastle, Richard Musgrave, Humphrey Musgrave, John Musgrave.

Comparatively rare.

NIXON

(Nicksoun)

Scottish and English. Upper Liddesdale, Bewcastle, Line rivers. Often described as having many “loose men”. Chief branch, Steile.

The sons of Nick were a troublesome breed, and an important part of the Armstrong-Elliot-Nixon-Croser confederacy. Although a smaller and less compact family than the Armstrongs, they were important enough to have Thomsons, Glendennings, and Hunters living “under them”, which is another way of saying associated with them.

Like other Liddesdales, they sometimes allied with England.

Notables: Fingerless Will Nixon, Archie of the Steile, Ill-drowned Geordie.

Common on West Marches.

ROBSON

Principally English. Tynedale, Liddesdale, West Teviotdale. Chief branches Middlesknowes and Owston.

The Robsons, “a wight riding sirname”, were at one time the leading family of Tynedale, and highly troublesome. They formed a violent power bloc with the Charltons, and also with the Dodds and Milburns, the other two principal tribes of the dale, although the Milburns were also found in Redesdale and Gilsland.

Notables: Ralph of Middlesknowes, Rowe of Alanstead.

Still numerous on the Border, as are the Milburns and Dodds.

SCOTT

Scottish. West Teviotdale, Ewesdale, Liddesdale. Chief branch, Buccleuch (Branxholm).

One of the most powerful families in the whole Border, active both as reivers and officers. They are so much a part of frontier history, and their branches are so numerous, that it is unnecessary to go into detail here.

Notables: Walter Scott of Buccleuch (d. 1552); his grandson, also Walter Scott (known variously as “the Bold Buccleuch”, “Flagellum Dei”, “God’s Curse”, etc.); Walter Scott (“Auld Wat”) of Harden.

Common throughout the Borders today.

STOREY

(Storie, Storye)

English. EWM, EMM, EEM, Eskdale.

A large but unfortunate clan who were forced out of the West by Lord Dacre in the 1520s for suspected treachery, and their land in Esk occupied by the Grahams. Latterly a surname of Northumberland and heavily involved in Middle March raiding and feud.

Notables: Jock of Awtenburn, Watt of the Hove End.

Common in English Border.

And finally, for the record, these are other Border tribes who, for reasons of space, have not been given more expanded notice.

EAST MARCH

Scotland—Trotter (listed as “gentlemen”), Dixon, Bromfield, Craw, Cranston.

England—Selby, Gray (“gentlemen”), Dunne.

MIDDLE MARCH

Scotland—East Teviotdale—Young, Pringle, Davison, Gilchrist, Tait. West Teviotdale—Oliver, Turnbull (Trumble), Rutherford. Liddesdale—Douglas, Laidlaw, Turner, Henderson.

England—Ogle, Heron, Witherington (Woodrington), Medford, Collingwood, Carnaby, Shaftoe, Ridley (“gentlemen”). Redesdale—Anderson, Potts, Read, Hedley. Tynedale—Dodd, Milburn, Yarrow, Stapleton. Also Stokoe, Stamper, Wilkinson, Hunter, Thomson, Jamieson.

WEST MARCH

Scotland—Carlisle, Beattie (also Baty, Batisoun), Little, Carruthers, Glendenning, Moffat.

England—Lowther, Curwen, Salkeld, Dacre, Harden, Hodgson Routledge (“every man’s prey”), Tailor, Noble.

1. The various Marches are indicated by initials—SWM for Scottish West March, EMM for English Middle March, and so on. DL is Debateable Land.

VIII
Hands across the Border

In auld times it was determinit … that there suld be na familiaritie betwix Scottis men and Inglis men, nor marriage to be contrakit betwix them, nor conventions on holydais at gammis and plays, nor merchandres to be maid amang them, nor Scottis men till enter on Inglis grond, nor Inglis men til enter on Scottis ground, witht out save conduct.… Bot thai statutis and artiklis are adnullit, for ther hes been grit familiaritie, and conventions, and makyng of merchandreis, on the boirdours, this lang tyme betwix Inglis men and Scottis men, baytht in pace and weir.…

—The Complaynt of Scotland

Of all the difficulties suffered by the Wardens, especially on the English side, none was more frustrating than the international character of the Borderers. This showed itself in several ways. Despite national rivalry, there was considerable fraternisation and co-operation between Scots and English along the frontier, socially, commercially and criminally. There was intermarriage on a large scale. There were “international” families like the Grahams, and communities of “our lawless people, that will be Scottishe when they will, and English at their pleasure”, as Thomas Musgrave put it. As the century wore on, more and more Scots became settled on the English side of the frontier, to the distress of the English Wardens, who regarded them (rightly) as a dangerous fifth column. In short, the administrative advantages of a frontier system, whereby two sides are neatly divided and controlled by the frontier, were completely lost because the Borderers used the frontier as and when it suited them, and ignored it when they felt like it.

There were good reasons for this attitude. English and Scots Borderers had everything in common except nationality; as we have seen already, they belonged to the same small, self-contained unique world, lived by the same rules, and shared the same inheritance. They raided and killed each other by way of business, but their view of Anglo-Scottish relations was totally different from the views of London and Edinburgh. They had to live on and by the frontier, and traditional national hostility, while it was real enough, did not prevent personal understanding and even friendship. Englishmen and Scotsmen tend to like and respect each other, when they meet on equal terms; on the Border, at all social levels, they were perfectly ready—provided feud or professional differences were for the moment out of the way—to enjoy each other’s company.

This was, of course, frowned on officially by governments who always had national security in mind.¹ “There is too great familiarity and intercourse between our English and Scottish borders,” John Carey wrote primly to the Privy Council, “the gentlemen of both countries crossing into either at their pleasure, feasting and making merry with their friends, overthrowing the Wardens’ authority and all Border law.”

There spoke the born bureaucrat; the international race meetings, huntings and hawkings, football matches, and social exchanges, must have seemed unnatural and dangerous to him. Of course, he had some reason, for “in like manner, the common thieves and outlaws, English and Scots, devising murders and robberies with their fellows” were a very real threat to the common peace. The co-operation between the reivers of both sides, especially the fugitives and outlaws, was a menace beyond control, and all the more difficult to tackle because it often rested not only on a professional basis, but on a family one.

Intermarriage between Scots and English was, from authority’s point of view, a continual embarrassment and danger—“the same is the decaie of Her Majesty’s service, and the greatest occasion of the spoils and robberies upon the Border,” wrote Simon Musgrave in 1583. It was highly prevalent, especially in the West Marches, where the most troublesome tribes lived. Both governments did their best to prevent it by law—at its most extreme this imposed the death penalty on Scots who married Englishwomen without licence, or who even received English men or women; on the English side, it was March treason to marry a Scotswoman, or even to befriend her, without the Warden’s permission.

Borderers were not the kind to ask leave for anything, and especially not to go courting. They married across the line with a fine disregard for the laws, which young Scrope in 1593 confessed were “too remissly executed”—so frequently, in fact, that when Thomas Musgrave drew up his celebrated list of Border riders, he made a special note of those Mangerton Armstrongs who were not married to English girls, and underlined his point by singling out the Elliots because few of them took English wives. The Armstrongs seem to have found the Graham and Forster girls particularly attractive, and vice versa.

The same thing happened all along the Border; one of the charges levelled against Sir John Forster, the English Middle March Warden, was that he tolerated inter-racial marriages—the Forsters with the Humes, the Selbys with the Rutherfords, the Collingwoods with the Halls of Teviotdale, the Reades with the Armstrongs, and so on. Forster, sunk deep as he was in Border politics, doubtless had his own private reasons for permitting these alliances, but these apart he was too old and worldly-wise to try to impose government’s law on nature’s.

These inter-racial marriages greatly complicated the Warden’s work (to say nothing of the historian’s) since they flatly contradicted the ancient working principle that Scot and English were mutually hostile. At worst, they provided an added incentive to English and Scottish marauders to combine in their depredations, and in their hostility to authority; at best they confused an already complicated social pattern. It was impossible for a Warden to rely on a man whose wife—and therefore father-in-law and brothers-in-law, to say nothing of uncles and cousins—belonged to the other side. A glance at Musgrave’s list, with its massive succession of Anglo-Scots marriages, or at the Graham genealogy, over which poor Burghley spent so much weary annotation, will explain why young Scrope was driven to despair by subjects who had ties with both sides of the line, and exploited them shamelessly.

To a virtual outsider like Scrope it was a hopeless situation. One of his own principal Border officers, Thomas Carleton, a former constable of Carlisle Castle, was closely related by marriage to the great Scottish reiver, Kinmont Willie. His English Grahams were so intertwined with the robber families of Liddesdale that “no officer could move against evil-doers of England or Scotland, but the Grahams knew of it and prevented it.” They were so strong by marriages on both sides that they were in a unique position to trouble the peace; apart from ordinary confederation with Scottish thieves, they were in the habit of importing their Scottish relatives to do their dirty work for them, and protesting their own innocence.

The Grahams were admittedly a special case. Scottish in origin, English by adoption, and ready to be either, they were settled within the limit of the English West March. The biggest family in the Western Border, they also had a fair claim to being the worst. In murder, blackmail, theft, extortion, and intrigue they were second to none—yet they held their English land on condition that they defend the Border against the Scots, watching the fords and being constantly “with gere and horses still reddye” to resist incursions. How well they did it was seen in the Kinmont raid when they actually assisted Buccleuch’s foray to Carlisle Castle, having done much of the plotting groundwork as well.

“Many of them are linckede in marriage [with the Scots], and partakers with them, and some bringers in of the same.” It was the understatement of the century, but manfully as Scrope tried to prove the Graham’s treachery (which everyone knew, anyway), he was never able to do anything effective about them.

And of course with the passage of time the general situation became worse, with the international family ties growing ever stronger and more complex, until it must have seemed to harassed officials like Scrope that everyone in his March had relatives over the Border, and was therefore involved in their tangled and ever-changing feuds and alliances. It became increasingly hard to determine who precisely was who, much less who could be trusted.

But if intermarriage was a dangerous nuisance, thickening the plots of regular criminal conspiracy, it was no more alarming to the English Wardens than Scottish immigration. Illegal pasturing of cattle, and even raising of crops, in the opposite realm, was one thing, but the permanent settlement of thousands of Scots on the English side of the line was a threat to national security. Hunsdon in 1587 found “so many Scottes planted within Northumberland, especially on the very Borders, as no exploit or purpose can be secretly resolved uppon, but … the Scottes have straight warning.” In some English towns there were more Scots than English; given authority, Hunsdon would get rid of two or three thousand of them.

This invasion was partly blamed on the fact that the English tenants had been driven out by Scottish raiders; it would have been fair to share the responsibility with oppressive English landlords. And it does not appear as though the ordinary English Marchman shared his superiors’ concern at the presence of the incomers; large numbers of Scots found employment as servants on the English side.

Not all of them were so welcome. The English West March found itself “for Scottes roges … overlaide with thousands”, and even in the largest English towns their presence constituted an insoluble problem. The Mayor of Berwick was complaining in 1592 of Scottish gentlemen banished from their own country for murder, who went armed about the city’s streets; no Scots-born person, he thought, should be permitted there, in particular those Scottish merchants who provided embarrassing competition to local traders, and carried English money into Scotland.² But in spite of his complaint, there were still three or four hundred Scots in Berwick four years later (over 10% of the population), although those men of the garrison with Scottish wives had been dismissed, and all Scottish servants banished. Those who remained were “too many for safety”, in John Carey’s opinion—“Marye! the country is full of Scottes!”

Berwick, although it had provided a special Scottish market place outside the fortifications in 1587 (after all, it depended on Scottish food) and prohibited Scots from lodging in the town “or to walk up and down”, was less successful with its unwanted immigrants than Carlisle. “Scotch merchants” were avoiding tolls there in 1596, but as the largest city on the Borders, inured to guarding the worst stretch of the frontier, it seems to have been more tolerant of those from north of the line. Most of its guilds had regulations discriminating against Scots, and the city itself forbade “unchartered” Scots to live there, or to walk the streets after curfew without an English companion. However, it also distinguished between “outmen” (those having business in the city but living outside) and “foroners” (complete strangers), so the Scots were not alone in being specially classified.³

Enforcing the discriminatory rules in the cities, and resisting the mass immigration which Hunsdon deplored in the Middle March, depended on being able to tell who was Scottish and who English. This was not always easy. Names were not a reliable indication, since many Border families were represented on both sides of the line, and adopted nationality accordingly. Although the Armstrongs were predominantly Scots, there were plenty of English Armstrongs who had lived in Cumberland from time immemorial, and who felt no kinship whatever for their Liddesdale namesakes. The muster roll of Askerton in England in 1580–81 contains fourteen Armstrongs out of a total of forty-nine names. The Grahams have already been mentioned as the classic example of a divided family; the Nixons and Crosers, important names of Liddesdale, were also as much English as Scottish; the Forsters, Halls, Bells, Littles and many others were to be found on both sides (see Chapter VII).

This was not just a case of small groups having left the parent clan and drifted across the Border; it may have been quite the reverse. Many of the leading Scottish families were in fact English in origin—the Maxwells, Armstrongs, Carlisles, and possibly the Johnstones, among others.

One can pity the innocent “non-Borderer” Wardens, or the unfortunate Frenchman who once held the Scottish East March, when confronted with this kind of mixture. An Armstrong might be an Englishman of unimpeachable standing—but he might well have Scottish relatives, and anyway before he could be safely pigeon-holed it would be necessary to find out if he was at feud with anyone, or to whom he was paying blackmail, or what professional alliances he might have. In the absence of computers, an “outsider” Warden could only call on God.

Birthplace and antecedents, when they could be established, provided a guide to a man’s nationality, but were not infallible. A heated dispute broke out between James VI of Scotland and young Scrope over one Robert Graham, whom the king claimed as “a Scottisman, borne, bapteist, mariit and bruiking (holding) land in Scotland”—powerful qualifications. Possibly so, said Scrope, but he could prove otherwise; for one thing, he had Graham’s admission that he was English. This, of course, was usually the decisive argument in doubtful cases: a man had to be accepted as what he said he was. Enterprising Borderers made the most of this; in 1550 Sandye Armstrong, ostensibly English and living in the Debateable Land, drove Lord Dacre to involved correspondence with London by threatening to become Scottish if the English Warden did not give him proper protection from his enemies.

These nationality cases baffled officialdom, who had no means of settling them. When Sir John Maxwell, Warden of the Scottish West March, laid before the Scottish Privy Council in 1564 a proposal that he should “admit George and Arthur Graham as Scottismen”, the council played a master-stroke. “Efter the mater wes resonit, and all motives and perswasionis were considerit”, Maxwell was told to use his own discretion.

In practice, there probably was one good test that could be applied to a Borderer whose nationality was in dispute, and whose antecedents were unknown: his accent. Even today, dialect has a habit of stopping dead at the Border line; to the native there is all the difference in the world between the harsh, resonant growl of the Cumbrian, the extraordinary guttural Northumbrian voice which makes “r” a drawn-out clearing of the throat, and the up-and-down cadences of the Scottish side. I suspect that on the Eastern Border a dialect expert would find that the accents have come closer together than they have in the West, where the social and cultural barrier between Scotland and England is today as solid as a wall, but in general the difference is strong and unmistakable. Too strong, at any rate, for any local person to confuse a Scots voice with an English one.

Yet there is a widely-held theory that in the sixteenth century there was a common Border accent, and that it was hard to tell Scotch from English. Possibly this belief has arisen because the vocabularies of the two sides are and were very close; the North-country Englishman says “ken” for “know”, and “ower” for “over”, and “cuddy” for “ass”, just as the Scot does. But the pronunciations are quite different, although this may not be so evident to the outsider’s ear.

The common-accent school cite as evidence the passage from a seventeenth-century London play in which a Northumbrian is mistaken for a Scot. “I was born in Redesdale,” he says, “and come of a wight riding sirname, called the Robsons; gude honest men, and true, saving a little shiftynge for theyr living; God help them, silly poor men.”

A woman answers: “Me thinke thou art a Scot by they tongue,” and the Robson denies it hotly.

This does not demonstrate anything satisfactorily except that a Londoner had difficulty in telling the difference; one is inclined to prefer the contemporary evidence of the letters in which Borderers, with their eccentric spellings, set their accents on paper. Take the Laird Johnstone, a Scot, writing in 1597:

“I resavit your lordschipis lettre this Vodinsday at four efter nowne,” he begins, and later continues “… and siclyk hes resavit ane lettre fra Thomis Senws (Senhouse?) desyring me to be in Cairlell this Vodinsday at iij, the quihilk lettre I gat nocht quhill fywe houris efter none.”

Now there, as clear as a bell across four centuries, is a Border Scot writing as he talks, with a broad Scottish accent. Could anyone believe that Johnstone spoke with the same accent as a Northumbrian like John Forster, who can be heard muttering gruffly as he writes to Walsingham:⁴

“For we that inhabit Northumberland are not acquaynted with any lerned and rare frazes, but sure I am I have uttered my mynde truly and playnely … where as I am wonderfully charged with aboundance of catell fedinge and bredinge uppon the Borders, as is aledged—I assure your honour I never solde non.”

The Northern English voice is unmistakeable—the last four words alone will clinch the matter for anyone who knows the Border voices.⁵ Both letters fit precisely into modern Scots and Northumbrian speech, so it seems reasonable to assume that the modern difference in accents is no greater than it was four hundred years ago.

However, even if the outsider Wardens did learn eventually to tell Scot from English by listening to them, they can never have recovered entirely from the shock of discovering just how deep and strong were the links and ties of culture, marriage, outlook, and behaviour between the supposedly opposite sides. Perhaps there are lessons in race relations on the old Border which might be studied with profit by modern sociologists. It was all there—race discrimination, victimisation by law, illegal immigration, and inter-racial marriage—and Border experience seems to suggest that whatever laws may be passed about segregation and integration are fairly irrelevant unless the people closely involved want to go along with them.

1. Eure thought it politic “to draw some of the headsmen from friendship with the Scots” in 1597. He was particularly anxious about the Fenwicks, Erringtons, and Robsons.

2. This may have been a well-founded complaint, in spite of the debasement of English coinage throughout the century. It is worth noting that in 1543 the Scottish Privy Council had forbidden the import of the English groat, because they “ar nocht silver and are false”.

3. The Smiths’ Guild of Carlisle went even further, specifically discriminating against “Francis forringers”. Anyone speaking a foreign tongue was, to Carlisle, simply a Frenchman.

4. Sir Francis Walsingham (1530–90), secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth from 1573 to his death, and famous as chief of intelligence and counterespionage.

5. One wonders if Shakespeare knew the Northumbrian accent—he could capture regional voices expertly, as he did in Henry V with Fluellen the Welshman and Jamy the Scot. Hotspur’s lines in Henry IV, Part 1, go beautifully in Northumbrian, especially his “I remember when the fight was done” speech; it is remarkable just how many words and phrases designed to emphasise the Northumbrian vocal peculiarities are contained in this passage—“perfumed like a milliner”, “guns and drums and wounds”, “untaught knaves, unmannerly”, and so on. The same is true for the whole of Hotspur’s part; it is hard to believe that this was accidental. (There is, of course, a tradition that Hotspur had a speech impediment, and that Shakespeare knew this. But as one gentleman living in the Coquet Valley has suggested, this apparent impediment may have been no more than an ordinary Northumbrian accent).

IX
Bangtail and company

The Borderers were unusual in so many things that it is not surprising to find that they had their own peculiar customs in the matter of forenames and nick-names, which fell into several categories.

The first, and most confusing of these, arose from the frequency with which men of the same clan and surname also bore the same Christian name—one index to the Calendar of Border Papers, for example, contains no fewer than twelve Hob Elliots, and there is an abundance of Jock Armstrongs, Walter Scotts, Richard Grahams, Andrew Forsters, and so on. It was necessary to distinguish them, and one method was to combine their Christian name with that of their father: thus Christie Armstrong the son of William Armstrong was Will’s Christie, while Christie Armstrong the son of Simon Armstrong was Sim’s Christie. This was sometimes carried on to a third generation, so that there were Gibb’s Geordie’s Francis, Dick’s Davie’s Davie, and Patie’s Geordie’s Johnnie. Occasionally the mother was cited, as in Bessie’s Andrew and Peggie’s Wattie.

A second method was to call a man by his place or land: Kinmont Willie, Lancie Whithaugh, Hob of the Leys, Jock of the Side, Jock of the Park, etc., or by his rank—Sim the Laird, for example. By a combination of the two methods we get Whithaugh’s Andy, the Laird’s Jock, Kinmont’s Jock, Hob the clerk’s brother, and the like.

All too often contemporary documents dispensed with surnames altogether, and since Armstrongs called the Laird’s Jock or Rynion’s Archie had a habit of cropping up generation after generation, the task of sorting them out becomes complicated. This happens well up the social scale, too, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the various Kerr family leaders, since they are almost invariably referred to not by their given names, but by their estates. One Cessford can look very like another, and the same is true of the great breed of Ferniehurst.

But the most interesting nick-names, and the ones in which the Borderers obviously took great pleasure, were those descriptive and often highly offensive appellations referring to personal appearance, habits, and behaviour. Thus we find Curst Eckie, Ill Will Armstrong, Fingerless Will Nixon, Nebless Clem Croser, the two Elliot brothers, Archie and George, who were familarly known as “Dog pyntle” and “Buggerback”, and an Armstrong called “Skinabake”. Names like these last three probably owe themselves to nothing more than the Borderers’ delight in thinking up irrelevant and poetic obscenities to attach to each other; Border children still bandy them about with disarming fluency.

On the other hand, one can guess how David Armstrong came to be known as “Bangtail”. Exploits of a sterner kind are commemorated in names like Ill-drowned Geordie, Archie Fire-the-Braes, Out-with-the-sword, Gav-yt-hem, Crack-spear, and Cleave-the-crune. These explain themselves, but one wonders how a reiver came to be known as Laird-give-me-little, or As-it-luiks, or Hen-harrow, or why the nickname Sweet-milk was so popular.¹

Robert Bruce Armstrong, the Liddesdale historian, had a fine collection of these names, many of them given above, and one cannot do better than this representative selection:

Hob the king, Dand the man, Gib alangsyde, Hob-wait-about-him, Red Cloak, Unhappy Anthone, Sow-tail, Ower-the-moss, Lang Will, Red Rowan, Wantoun Sim, David-no-gude-priest, Evilwillit Sandie, Shag, Bull, Lamb, Mouse, Sore John and Wynking Will.

If we knew how they came to be awarded we would know more of the Borders than we can ever discover from conventional histories.

1. There is a striking resemblance between some of these names and those of Red Indians like Alligator-Stands-Up, Thunder-Rolling-over-the-Mountain, and Crazy Horse. Many of these meant the opposite of what they appeared to mean—e.g. Man-Afraid-of-his-Horses, far from being a term of contempt, meant literally a man so formidable that even the sound of his horses terrified his enemies. Probably some of the Border names above have the same kind of hidden meaning.

X
The game and the song

Like so many warlike people, the Borderers were sports enthusiasts, and still are. The little Scottish towns, with their small catchment areas, produce Rugby teams that compare with the biggest club sides anywhere; within living memory the wrestlers of Cumberland, farm boys and Saturday afternoon amateurs, could send out a team to meet the best in the world and beat them.

There was no Rugby in the sixteenth century, but there was “football”, the father of Rugby, Soccer, and the American game. In its primitive form it lingers today in places like Jedburgh and Workington, where most of the young male population is supposed to take part, and the playing area covers the whole town. The old Borderers loved their football, and on the Scottish side even the nobility joined in, despite the laws against “futbawis, gouff, or uthir sic unprofitable sportis”. Mary Queen of Scots once watched a two-hour match on the meadow beneath Carlisle Castle, and Francis, Earl Bothwell, the notorious “King Devil”, played the game on the Esk with other “declairit traitours to his Majesty” in 1592. He occasionally played dirty too, if we can accept Robert Bowes’ account of an earlier match in which “some quarrel happened betwixt Bothwell and the Master of Marishal upon a stroke given at football on Bothwell’s leg by the Master, after that the Master had received a sore fall by Bothwell.” Every football fan will recognise this sequence of events; obviously some things about the game have not changed. Following the incident Bothwell and the Master agreed to meet secretly next day to fight the matter out, and the king had to intervene.

Football incidents were not always so trivial, however. One match, the fore-runner of the Scotland v. England internationals, perhaps, resulted in slaughter. It happened in 1599, when six Armstrongs came to Bewcastle to play a match against six of the local English boys, and after the game there was “drynkyng hard at Bewcastle house”. However, it happened that a Mr William Ridley, an Englishman, “knowing the continual haunt and receipt the great thieves and arch murderers of Scotland, had with the captain of Bewcastle”, determined to capture the Armstrong footballers while they were on English ground. No sportsman, he assembled his friends and lay in wait, but somehow the Armstrongs had been tipped off, and Mr Ridley’s ambush party found themselves suddenly set on by more than 200 riders. Ridley and two of his friends were killed, thirty taken prisoner, “and many sore hurt, expecially John Whytfeild whose bowells came out, but are sowed up againe”.

The result of the game is not recorded.

Even more popular was horse-racing, in which the Borderers excelled, especially in the West Marches. The prizes were usually bells, and the oldest, dating from the 1590s, is in Tullie House Museum, Carlisle. Like the football matches, race meetings were frowned on by the authorities because they attracted the dregs of society, and were commonly used as covers by plotters: the rescue of Kinmont Willie was planned, in its later stages, at a Scottish race meeting, and the murder of Sir John Carmichael, a Scottish Warden, by Armstrongs, was plotted at a football match.

However, Wardens and officers sometimes attended the races. Young Buccleuch was a race addict, Lord Willoughby¹ entered horses at Scottish meetings and won a bell, and young Scrope, who was a compulsive gambler, attended at least one meet where he conducted secret political business. The meetings appear to have been quietly run, considering the times, but there were occasional outbursts of violence, and at one meeting where a Graham and an Irvine quarrelled, the Irvine’s horse was killed.

Racehorses were greatly prized, and although horse-trading between the realms was forbidden from time to time, leading Borderers as well as lesser men were willing to wink at the law where a good mount was concerned. It was not unknown even for a Warden officer to enter a horse for a race so that a prominent reiver from the other country might judge it with a view to buying—and this a reiver whom the officer had arrested in dramatic circumstances not long before (see p. 120, note 5).

Hawking, hunting and fishing were of course popular sports, and occasionally provided the excuse for Anglo-Scottish fraternisation, although one celebrated hunting resulted in bloodshed, and almost full-scale battle. Farther down the sporting scale cock-fighting was popular, and still takes place in Cumberland: during the war I saw a main organised by Border Regiment soldiers in Burma, and only a few years ago a Cumberland farmer ran for Parliament on a platform to legalise cock-fighting.²

All these sports lent themselves to gambling, which seems to have been quite heavy, and cards was also a popular way of losing money and stolen goods. Reivers commonly wagered their spoils; for example, William Taylor of Hethersgill, an Englishman who rode forays with the Armstrongs, “had fower nowte (cattle) about his house, stolen from Chalke, and plaied one of them away at cards”. At the other end of the social scale King James IV of Scotland, visiting Dumfries in 1504, played cards against the English Warden, Lord Dacre, who took him for £2 6s 8d. Border papers and letters contain many references to cards, but dice is less frequently mentioned.

The more sophisticated entertainments were rare. London might be enjoying a theatrical boom late in Elizabeth’s reign, but when a troupe of actors crossed the Border in 1599 it was such a phenomenon that John Carey wrote to Cecil about it: the Kirk had forbidden them to appear in Scotland, he reported, “and have preached against them with very vehement reprehensions”. But to the great offence of the Church, King James VI, who was a theatre enthusiast, commanded that the players should perform and that no one should be prevented from seeing them.

But such entertainments, if they had ever reached the Borderland, would have seemed tame to people whose pastime it was to fashion their drama from their own lives. “They take great pleasure in their own music”, wrote Leslie, “and in their rhythmical songs, which they compose upon the exploits of their own ancestors.” When James IV came to the Borders, with a large following of minstrels and musicians, he also spent sums on local performers, who included a girl from Carlisle specially engaged to sing for him. Her fee was 28s. But although they might hold their own in music, it was in poetry that the Borderers excelled.

The Border ballads are world famous. They are earth poetry. That they have survived in such quantity is due largely to the industry and enthusiasm of Sir Walter Scott, who saved them from oblivion. He and others added ballads of their own, but both the original folk-poems and the imitations are in a literary class by themselves. It seems strange that such a crude, warlike folk should produce such a vital and lasting literature. Scott believed that the wilder the society the more violent the impulse received from poetry and music; the impulse in the Border was both violent and permanent.

They made their poems about their robber heroes, and as a result their characteristics are turbulence and melancholy. How much Scott amended and edited the oral traditions we shall never know exactly; he was never one to spoil a good thing for the want of a little adjustment. But the raw material was magnificent; listen to the opening lines of “Jock o’ the Side”, with its stark urgency and echo of hoofs on the tops:

Now Liddesdale has ridden a raid

But I wat they had better hae stayed at hame,

For Michael of Winfield he is dead

And Jock o’ the Side is prisoner ta’en.

And compare the quiet, ominous words of the English reiver, Hobbie Noble,³ planning his last foray:

“But will ye stay till the day go down

Until the night come o’er the ground,

And I’ll be a guide worth any twa

That may in Liddesdale be found.”

But word is gane to the land sergeant,

In Askerton where that he lay—

“The deer that ye hae hunted sae lang

Is seen into the Waste this day.”

Or the saddest of all Border songs, “The Lament of the Border Widow”, supposedly written of a reiver hanged at his own door in 1529:

But think na ye my heart was sair

When I laid the mould on his yellow hair?

O think na ye my heart was wae

When I turned about, away to gae?

No living man I’ll love again,

Since that my lovely knight is slain,

With ae lock of his yellow hair

I’ll chain my heart for evermair.

These are fragments; to read through Scott’s “Minstrelsy” is to go into a new world whose echoes have sounded through the poetry and folk music of the English-speaking peoples.⁴ For those who can take the ballads—and not everyone can—they provide a haunting impression of the Border spirit, captive and restless in a hostile world, sometimes breaking free in exhilarating imagination, but always returning to the resigned sadness of the North.

This, then, was the background and culture of the Anglo-Scottish frontier society of the sixteenth century. We have seen how it arose, what influences shaped it, and how it had come to prey on itself for existence. The essence of the story is how the preying was done, who did it, and how authority tried to stop it.

1. Peregrine Bertie, 11th Lord Willoughby d’Eresby (1535–1601), Warden of the English East March and Governor of Berwick from 1598 till his death, is commemorated in the old ballad as

“… the brave Lord Willoughby, who is both fierce and fell,

He will not give one inch of ground for all the devils in hell.”

A renowned military leader and splendid swordsman, Willoughby was slightly less of an aristocrat than his name and tide suggest. He was the legitimate son of Baroness Willoughby and her gentleman-usher (whose father had been master-mason of Winchester Cathedral) and “could not brook the obsequiousness and assiduity of the court” hi his own words, Willoughby was “none of the reptilia”.

2. He was not elected, but attracted some enthusiastic supporters, who greeted his platform appearances with cries of “Git the spurs oot and let’s git crackin’”.

3. Hobbie (Halbert) Noble figures in two of the best-known Border ballads. In one he is a rescuer of Jock of the Side from Newcastle prison; the second ballad describes Hobbie’s own betrayal by one Simon Armstrong of the Mains to the English authorities. According to both ballads he was a Bewcastle man, outlawed for his crimes, and living with the Liddesdale Armstrongs. In fact there was a “Hobbe Noble” living in Bewcastle with others of his own surname and with the English Nixons in 1583 (Musgrave’s list); he may be the famous reiver of the ballads, since he was contemporary with Jock Armstrong of the Side, and with several Simon Armstrongs. But there is no record of his being outlawed, or going to Scotland, although it is interesting to note that the Nobles, English in 1583, were being referred to by 1596 as “leige subjects of Scotland”.

4. Among the modern poets who were touched by the spirit of the Border ballads, Kipling is foremost. And possibly a poetic gift may be inherited across the centuries—it is at least interesting that one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century was an Eliot.

PART THREE

XI
Lance and steel bonnet

The Border robber was a specialist, and needed special equipment, the most important part of which was his horse. “They reckon it a great disgrace for anyone to make a journey on foot,” wrote Leslie, and Froissart had noted two centuries earlier how the Scots at war “are all a-horseback … the common people on little hackneys and geldings.” The Border horses, called hobblers or hobbys, were small and active, and trained to cross the most difficult and boggy country, “and to get over where our footmen could scarce dare to follow.”

Such precious animals naturally attracted legislation, particularly in England, where horses were in short supply. In the late 1500s their export to Scotland was strictly banned; Hunsdon “condemde sundry” for this treason in 1587, and complained that English gentlemen were involved in the illicit trade. It was a well-broken law in both directions, for Scotland had banned horse export twenty years earlier, with no great success.

The Scots had long been noted horse-breeders, so much so that legislation was occasionally passed to restrain production. By statute of 1214 every Scot of property must own at least one horse, and in 1327 the country could put 20,000 cavalry into the field. Export to England at that time was highly profitable, and was carried on even by men of rank. The Stuart kings imported from Hungary, Poland, and Spain to improve the breed, and there emerged the small, swift unusually hardy mounts which in James IV’s time were reputed to be able to cover as much as 150 miles in a day. They must have been short miles.

However, even allowing for exaggeration, such horses were ideal all-purpose mounts both for peace-time raiders and war-time light cavalry. They enabled the Border riders to muster and move men at high speed over remarkable distances. A leader like young Buccleuch could raise 2000 horse at short notice, able to strike faster and at far greater range than would have seemed credible to an ordinary cavalry commander; between sixty and eighty miles a day seems to have been within their capability.¹ In addition, the horses were cheap to buy and easy to maintain: there is evidence that they did not even need shoeing.

The Border rider, as he sat his hobbler, was a most workmanlike figure, far more streamlined than the ordinary cavalryman of his time. His appearance was “base and beggarly” by military standards, and this applied to the lords as well as to the lowly. “All clad a lyke in jackes cooverd with whyte leather, dooblettes of the same or of fustian, and most commonly all white hosen,” Patten noted after Pinkie (1547). “Not one with either cheine, brooch, ryng or garment of silke that I coold see.… This vilnes of port was the caus that so many of their great men and gentlemen wear kyld and so fewe saved. The outwarde sheaw … whearby a stranger might discern a villain from a gentleman, was not amoong them to be seen.”

On his head the rider wore the steel bonnet, which in the early part of the century was usually the salade hat, basically a metal bowl with or without a peak, or the burgonet, a rather more stylish helmet which, in its lightest form, was open and peaked. These head-pieces, many of which would be home-made by local smiths, were gradually replaced in Elizabethan times by the morion, with its curved brim, comb, and occasional ear pieces.

Over his shirt the rider might wear a mail coat, but the more normal garment was the jack, a quilted coat of stout leather sewn with plates of metal or horn for added protection. It was far lighter than armour, and almost as effective against cuts and thrusts; backs and breasts of steel might be worn by the wealthier Borderers, but for horsemen whose chief aim was to travel light they were a mixed blessing. The Scots Borderers were officially recognised by the Privy Council as “licht horsemen” who were not obliged to serve in heavy armour during war; the English Borderers, when employed on campaigns, were similarly used as scouts and “prickers”.

Leather boots and breeches completed the clothing, which was without badges except in war-time, when the riders wore kerchiefs tied round their arms as signs of recognition, as well as the crosses of St George or St Andrew, according to their nationality—or their allegiance. Embroidered letters attached to their caps were also used for war-time identification. (There was a suspicion in the English Army in the 1540s that the English March riders used these identifying signs not only to be known to each other, but “that thei used them for collusion, and rather bycaus thei might be knowen to th’enemie, as the enemies are knowen to them, for thei have their markes too, and so in conflict either each to spare other, or gently each to take other. Indede men have beeen mooved the rather to thinke so, bycaus sum of their crosses—the English red cross—were so narrow, and so singly set on, that a puff of wynde might blowed them from their breastes.”)²

This light and serviceable costume, so suitable for the cut-and-run activities of its wearer, reflected also the changing military patterns of the day. The sixteenth century saw a revolution in warfare; it was the bridge between the medieval knights and men-at-arms, with their heavy armour and weapons, and the age of firepower.

Gunpowder had come into its own, and when it was discovered that mail did not stop a bullet, the whole concept of protective equipment changed. Long leather boots took the place of greaves, plate gave way to the reinforced coat, and the knight’s casque to the open helmet.

The great change, of course, was in missile weapons. For two centuries England’s military thinking had been dominated by one of the most lethal hand weapons in the history of warfare: the six-foot long bow with which the English peasant had mastered the powers of chivalry. Naturally, England was reluctant to change from this proven battle-winner, and in this as in most other military developments she lagged behind the Continent, even under such a war-conscious monarch as Henry VIII.

The hand-gun v. long bow controversy, which reached a climax in Elizabeth’s reign, was a bitter one. The bow school, apart from their sentimental reasons, urged the efficiency of the archer who could despatch twelve shots a minute into a man-sized target at 200 paces (practice at shorter ranges was actually forbidden in Henry’s time); against this the new arquebus could fire only ten to twelve shots an hour when Elizabeth came to the throne, although the rate had risen to thirty-five to forty by 1600. An arquebus was unsuitable in wet weather, it was cumbersome, and it cost 30s. (A bow cost about 6s 8d, with arrows). The Earl of Sussex, on the Border in 1569, demanded archers, not “ill-furnished harquebusiers”, and local opinion seems to have supported him; the tenants of Home Cultram, as late as 1596, rejected calivers as too expensive.

But the fire-arms lobby, which included such influential figures as the veteran Sir Roger Williams, eventually got their way; in the 1560s the majority of English infantry carried the long bow, but by 1600 it was virtually obsolete in the country as a whole. On the Border, however, where a light, rapid-fire weapon was needed, the bow lived longer; in Leith Ward, Cumberland, in 1580, the muster roll showed over 800 bowmen to nine arquebusiers, and in the 1583 muster the English West March counted 2500 archers, with no mention of fire-arms. Hundreds of hand-guns with ammunition were sent to Berwick in 1592, but the powder was unreliable, and as for the guns, “when they were shot in, some of them brake, and hurte divers mennes hands.” In the same year Richard Lowther asked only for bows for the defence of Carlisle.³

Like the local peasant infantry, the Border riders also used the bow, but there is increasing mention as the century progresses of their carrying arquebuses, the light pieces called calivers, and the dag, the heavy hand-gun which was the tough equivalent of the modern large-calibre pistol.

The principal close-quarter weapons of the Border foot soldier were the bill, the long cleaver-cum-pike which had lasted through the Middle Ages, the spear, and a local arm called the Jedburgh axe, with a distinctive round cutting edge. Swords are seldom mentioned in the English muster rolls, but the March riders of both sides certainly carried them, occasionally with small shields.

However, in peace or war, the rider’s favourite weapon was the lance. These were sometimes over thirteen feet long, but usually must have been shorter. They were used couched, for thrusting, and also for throwing. Camden describes the Borderers on horseback spearing salmon in the Solway; anyone who has tried to spear fish on foot will appreciate the expertise required to do it from the saddle.

Eure pronounced on this Border skill without qualification: he found the March riders better at handling lances on horseback than Yorkshiremen, and “better prickers in a chase as knowing the mosses, more nimble on foot.”

This then was the Borderer’s armoury, for war-time campaign or peace-time raid. So if one mounts the reiver on his hobbler, with steel cap, jack, lance, cutting-sword, dagger, and hand-gun,⁴ he is fully equipped and ready to be pointed at the target—farm, village or grazing herd, peel tower or sheiling. This, quite literally, was his day’s work.

1. Froissart says twenty to twenty-four leagues a day, which is around seventy miles. It has been suggested that this is an incredible distance for armed riders, and that for “leagues” one should read “miles”. But Howard Pease has produced evidence to show that when Froissart said leagues he meant just that (i.e. three miles), and as we know that in 1603 Robert Carey rode close on 400 miles from London to Edinburgh in sixty hours (and took a nasty wound on the way, which reduced his speed) it seems safe to credit Froissart’s estimate.

As to their mustering speed, there is abundant evidence, in Warden’s correspondence and elsewhere, of the Borderers’ ability to be armed and riding in force in a remarkably short time after an alarm; John Maxwell of Herries reckoned that 350 horsemen could be assembled in thirty minutes.

2. The authority again is William Patten, a shrewd Londoner who accompanied Somerset’s Scottish expedition in 1547. One of his army acquaintances was young William Cecil, later Lord Burghley; the two of them kept journals of the expedition, which Patten used when he published his account of the campaign.

3. Possibly the fact that one Scottish monarch, James II, had lost his life through a bursting cannon in 1460 helped to prejudice the Scots against fire-arms. Hertford noted in the 1540s that the “Scotishe borderers … love no gonnes, ne will abyde withyn the hearyng of the same”.

4. Basically the reiver’s equipment was not very different from that which the English Border light horseman was supposed to carry for government service, and which the Bishop of Durham defined as “a steele cap, a coate of plate, stockings and sleeves of plate, bootes and spurres, a Skottisch short sworde and a dagger, an horsemans staffe and a case of pistolls”.

XII
How the reivers rode

The reivers themselves, as has already been mentioned, might be anything from peers to farm hands; some were full-time professional raiders, others divided their time fairly evenly between agriculture and stealing, and some made only occasional forays, when times were hard or they were offered a particularly tempting quarry. They commonly rode in family parties—Liddesdale raids were almost invariably made up of permutations of Elliots, Armstrongs, Crosers, and Nixons, just as the Redesdale and Tynedale incursions consisted largely of Charltons, Dodds, Milburns, and Robsons.

Obviously raiders got to know each other, and there is strong evidence of professional loyalty, the same men riding in each other’s company again and again, whether or not they belonged to the same family. This professional tie often spanned the Border, and it was common for Englishmen to ride with Scottish bands, and vice versa. The outlaw operations, of course, were international; gangs like Sandy’s Bairns, with whom Kinmont Willie rode latterly, would welcome recruits from anywhere.

Unfortunately there were no Pepyses among the reivers, to leave a day-to-day journal of their activities. So we can only guess how many raids were casual affairs, and how many were carefully plotted weeks in advance. We cannot know for sure if some raider’s wife, aware that her larder was running short, ever did lay a dish of spurs before her husband as a hint to be busy. One can imagine an Armstrong, in his tower, finding time hanging heavy and whistling in his sons and cousins for a spur-of-the-moment foray to Redesdale or Gilsland; they would perhaps enlist a couple of Elliots on the way, or pick up a specialist in the shape of a rider who knew the target area particularly well. On the other hand, a leader like Buccleuch was, as we know, capable of the most meticulous planning and intelligence work before he mounted a foray.

Frequently raids began from what was called a “tryst”, a prearranged meeting-place where the last-minute details were settled. These were usually well-known landmarks, and when a raid had set off without its full muster, a sign would be left to indicate the direction taken. According to Scott, one method was to cut the leader’s name or signal in the turf, the arrangement of the letters indicating the path to be followed.

Everyone who writes about the reiver’s technique invariably quotes Bishop Leslie, in one of his various translations. This is Camden’s, quoted by Scott; it is worth remembering that it applies to both Scottish and English alike.

“They sally out of their own borders, in the night, in troops, through unfrequented by-ways, and many intricate windings. All the day time, they refresh themselves and their horses, in lurking holes they had pitched upon before, till they arrive in the dark at those places they have a design upon. As soon as they have seized upon the booty, they, in like manner, return home in the night, through blind ways, and fetching many a compass. The more skilful any captain is to pass through those wild deserts, crooked turnings, and deep precipices, in the thickest mists and darkness, his reputation is the greater, and he is looked upon as a man of an excellent head.

“And they are so very cunning, that they seldom have their booty taken from them … unless sometimes, when, by the help of blood-hounds following them exactly upon the tract, they may chance to fall into the hands of their adversaries. When being taken, they have so much persuasive eloquence, and so many smooth insinuating words at command, that if they do not move their judges, nay, and even their adversaries (notwithstanding the severity of their natures), to have mercy, yet they incite them to admiration and compassion.”

His lordship the bishop writes with such feeling and descriptive skill that one wonders if he wasn’t out with the Armstrongs himself on some occasion. He has the exact mood of the business, and everything he says is consistent with the voluminous records of raids left in Border documents. What he was describing was a long-distance foray, such as might be made by Liddesdale riders far into the English Middle March, with only a small number of men involved and the need for passing undetected of the first importance.

Raids varied in size. Bands of a dozen to fifty riders were normal, but there were one-man operations, and great forays in which upwards of two or three thousand reivers took part. The objectives also varied, from a single animal—as in the case of the black horse which helped to rekindle the Maxwell-Johnstone feud—to an entire town, or even several towns. Distance was no object for rustlers who were expert at covering their traces, or who ventured out in sufficient numbers to be able to defy pursuit. Border raids are recorded within three miles of Edinburgh, and as far south as Yorkshire. What is striking is that the thieves far more often than not got away with it, which suggests that Leslie’s skilful captains and men of excellent heads were by no means uncommon.

Night-time was the popular hour for riding, although day forays of all sizes were frequent. There is some evidence that the reivers liked moonlight—“There’ll be moonlight again” is a slogan long associated with the Scott family—but even more to suggest that they preferred complete darkness. The expert guides seem to have known their ground to an inch, and the kind of leader typified by Hobbie Noble, the legendary English fugitive, could pick his way through the wastes at night with ease.

The size of the foray naturally dictated the technique employed. While small bands depended heavily on stealth and secrecy, the great raids went much more openly; they had less to fear from a hot trod or the country’s rising against them, since they were strong enough to fight off anything short of an army. Consequently, their leaders planned these forays like miniature military campaigns, often spending several days in enemy territory, or even longer, depending on the danger of the general situation.

A master of the large-scale foray technique was that old Walter Scott of Buccleuch who flourished in the first part of the sixteenth century, was an inveterate English-hater, spent several terms in confinement in Scotland for political and other reasons, and was eventually cut down by the Kerrs in the great Kerr – Scott feud. When he swept into the English Middle March in the winter of 1532 it was with 3000 lances, most of whom he held in reserve while smaller forays were detached at chosen targets. The main body thus served the double purpose of base camp, established on an English village, and ambush for any English trods which might pursue Buccleuch’s smaller raiding bands.

The ambush was a common variation of the large and medium-sized raids, the reivers leaving a strong party posted on their proposed return route, so that pursuers chasing a raid frequently found themselves surrounded and beset by an unexpectedly large enemy force. This was a favourite stratagem of the Armstrongs, who practised it memorably against Lord Dacre in 1528 (see pp. 233–4).

The raiding season, although it was never closed in practice, was autumn to spring, when the cattle and their owners were in their permanent winter quarters in the valleys. As the summer waned, anxiety grew along the frontier; “the longer the nights growe, the worse they will be”, wrote Robert Carey one late August, and young Scrope in November was lamenting: “The depe of winter and most unquiet season is come upon us.” Carey made a study of this aspect of reiving, and pronounced the last months of the year as the worst, “for then are the nights longest, theyre horses at hard meat, and will ride best, cattel strong, and will drive farthest.”

Of those closing months, the worst period was from Michaelmas (September 29) to Martinmas (November 11): “then are the fells good and drie and cattle strong to dryve”. The dead of winter was comparatively less troublesome, because of foul weather and the weaker state of the cattle. This weakness had reached a peak by Candlemas (February 2), when with the nights growing shorter and oats dearer, the reivers’ horses were less well fed and ready to be put to grass.

Thus Robert Carey, waxing technical on an admittedly technical subject: he even noticed that the thieves “will never lightly steal hard before Lammas (August 1), for fear of the assizes, but beeing once past, they returne to their former trade”. In fact it was probably not the assizes, but the removal of the cattle to the high sheilings during the summer that restrained the robbers. But his observations show up some of the finer points of reiving, although judging by Border records the pattern of raiding was spread more generally over the year than his findings suggest.

As to any geographical pattern of raids, it is difficult to say more than that the general trend from Scotland was south-eastwards, the Western end of the frontier containing by far the most troublesome elements, while from England the Middle March raiders forayed in all directions. Edward Aglionby’s report to Burghley of 1592 is quite definite that the English West and Middle Marches suffered most from Liddesdale, but that Teviotdale “doth never offend the West Border”. Lord Willoughby, at Berwick, was equally positive that all the spoils in the English East March were committed over the Tweed fords.

But it is dangerous to take these generalisations too much for granted, just as it is unwise to emphasise too strongly the importance of the so-called “reivers’ roads” which cross the Border at various points. It is tempting for a geographer to pick on well-defined paths and passages, and suggest that these were used habitually by the rustlers. The last thing a Border reiver wanted was to follow a known route, especially on the way home. There were, by contemporary calculation, more than forty passages into the English Middle March,¹ but unless the Border character has changed considerably, they were probably often ignored in favour of going “over the tops”. Men who know their business can take cattle over some unpromising country.

One thing is sure: the ground most often crossed by raiders was the Bewcastle Waste, a wild area of fell and moor lying south-east of Liddesdale on the English side. It was the very hub of the Middle and West Marches, and there is ample documentary confirmation of Lord Dacre’s assertion in 1528, that “theye come thorow Bewcastelldale, and retirnes, for the moste parte, the same waye agayne”.

But not invariably, according to Thomas Musgrave fifty years later. Writing to Burghley, he described two Liddesdale routes quite specifically; one, directed at the Coquet Valley, skirted Bewcastle to the east and ran “by the Perlfell without the Horse Head near Kelder, and so along abone Chepechase”. The second, to Tyne Water, was by Kershopehead, skirting Gele Crage, and by Tarnbek, Bogells Gar, Spye Crag, and Lampert. Musgrave was an expert frontiersman, and his information can be relied on. But these were routes which would be fashionable for a time—as in the Elliot – Fenwick feud; for the most part, the reivers were liable to ride anywhere, at any time, in any numbers.

To understand how good their scouting and woodcraft was, we should see what they were up against, quite apart from the dark, the weather, and the rough country. On the English side the most expert of all Wardens, Lord Wharton, had established a formidable guard system in the 1550s, whereby the entire frontier, from Solway to Berwick, was under watch night and day, from October to mid-March; local gentlemen were made responsible for arming and horsing their people, and setting and inspecting the watches, which were posted on hilltops, fords, valleys, and every conceivable passage over the Marches. Wharton, a hard man who believed in hanging first and asking questions later, reinforced his system with harsh penalties for neglect of duty; it was death not to resist raiders,² all intercourse with Scots was forbidden, and gentlemen were under the strictest instructions to see his rules enforced. He knew his Borderers, and was determined to stamp out any fifth column activities on the raiders’ behalf.

Nor could the reivers count on watches always being in the same place; small mobile patrols were also used, and “plump” watches of unusual strength were liable to be set up as occasion demanded.

To man the frontier efficiently, about 1000 watchers were necessary; it follows that in spite of the regulations, there was some defaulting. Young Scrope found difficulty in maintaining plump watches of forty horse in the West, and at Morpeth in the winter of 1597 there was a flat refusal to stand watches, so that a plump watch had to be moved in. Possibly owing to shortage of men, day watches seem to have been indifferently kept in young Scrope’s time.

Watches on the Scottish side seem to have been less organised, which may be significant, but here as in England there was a system of beacons on hilltops and the roofs of towers to give the alarm. Owners of towers were obliged to light their beacons on learning of any fray by night; the penalty for failure was a 3s 4d fine. In Liddesdale the approach of a raid in daylight was signalled by spreading a white sheet over a prominent bush on a hillside or crest, this being repeated all along the valley.

England had another line of defence, in the establishment of numbers of “slewdogges”³ for the tracking down of raiders; money was raised for their maintenance, and from the number of them stolen in raids it is obvious that they were highly prized. They could be worth as much as £10.

So, even allowing for those watchers who were in league with the reivers, or were too terrified to give them away, the business of raiding was fraught with hazards. From the moment the March limits were crossed, the marauders were riding in the shadow of the gallows; if some of their exploits were undoubtedly mean and cruel, they can hardly be called cowardly. Even when they were riding into a frightened countryside (which was often the case in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign), and were sufficiently expert to avoid or evade the guards, tracker dogs, and mobile patrols, to lift their plunder and shake off pursuit, there were some dangers which could not be anticipated. No band could ever be sure that they were the only ones out on the fells at night; half a dozen raids might cross each others’ tracks in the dark, and although hi-jacking was not common, it did happen at least once, to an Elliot party who made a quick dawn foray into Bewcastle only to be jumped by a returning band of English night raiders, who lifted the Scots’ booty of eighty head.

1. The names attached to some of the Middle March riders’ passages are highly evocative: Murders Rack, Hell Cauldron, Keilder Edge, Thrust Pick, etc.

2. The penalty was eventually relaxed, and after 1570 watchers in the English West and Middle Marches who failed to raise a hue and cry against thieves were only held liable for goods stolen.

3. Also given as sloughdogs and sleuthdogs. Scott traces the name from the sloughs and mosses through which they followed the scent, but it seems more likely that it came from sleuth, meaning a track or trail. Trail hounds are common in Cumberland today, where they are used for long-distance racing. They travel at surprising speeds after scent, and it seems possible that the sleuthdogs of the sixteenth century were of this breed, rather than bloodhounds.

XIII
Nothing too hot or too heavy

It is this side of the reiver’s work—the danger, the bravery, the almost sporting spirit in which he rode out—that has been emphasised by the romancers. It was there, no doubt of it, and it is easy to treat him as a hero figure because sometimes he was indeed heroic. People like to remember him at his best, as a jolly, daredevil Robin Hood, rough but generous, a product of his times who was no doubt full of mischief, but was decent at bottom, and had some peculiar patriotic aura glowing round him as he went about his work of pillage. It is not difficult, by a judicious selection of cases and evidence, to justify this view.

Isabell Routledge, a widow, owning a small herd and a house of her own in the English West March, saw him rather differently. On April 2 1581 she was visited by thirty Elliots, who ransacked her home, took her four oxen, her six cows, and her only horse, and made off with all her possessions. At that, she was luckier than another woman named Hetherington, who a few years later was raided, again by Elliots, who murdered her husband and another man, and stole her herd of forty head.

And both were more fortunate than Hecky Noble who, within a few nights of Mrs Hetherington’s widowhood, was a victim of that gay desperado, Dickie Armstrong of Dryhope,¹ and his 100 jolly followers. Apart from reiving a herd of 200 head, and destroying nine houses, the raiders also burned alive Hecky’s son John, and his daughter-in-law, who was pregnant.

For Dick of Dryhope this was part of the night’s work. Two days earlier he had murdered a miller named Tailor and another man, burned the mill and twelve houses, and reived 100 beasts. Two months later, he and his friends were despoiling another woman, Margaret Forster, of Bewcastle, stealing her eighteen cattle and rifling her home.

These are not isolated cases. On the contrary, they are typical of Border raiding. The lists are endless of small herds lifted, of homes burned, of “insight” (household goods) removed, value a few pounds, of men wounded, or kidnapped, or occasionally killed. To give an idea of what this meant, one can only examine figures for certain areas and periods.

When the Elliots of Liddesdale were riding in the summer of 1581, they were moving in bands generally 100 strong. In June and July alone they stole in the West March of England 274 cattle and twelve horses, ransacked nine houses, “wounded and maimed” three men, and took one prisoner. Statistics are deceptive; if one tries to see it in the light of a modern newspaper report, it is easier to imagine the horror of thirty sturdy hooligans descending on a woman’s house in the night, looting and smashing, and then riding off. This happened along the Marches day in, day out, year after year.

It is instructive to consider the havoc wrought by only one of the Border raiding tribes, over a period. Figures are available for the forays run by the Elliots over a decade from the early 1580s; they are almost certainly conservative figures, since they take account only of actual raids complained of and recorded. And they include only raids in which the Elliots were in a majority; other forays in which the Elliots took a hand, but were not the ringleaders, have been excluded.

There were more than forty of these “exclusively Elliot” raids, and the total score, at the lowest estimate, was more than 3000 cattle stolen, over £1000 worth of insight taken, sixty-six buildings destroyed, fourteen men murdered, and 146 prisoners kidnapped. And this was done, not by the entire Elliot clan, but by only seventy-nine principal riders with their unnamed followers. Taking account of population, property values, the purchasing power of money, the size of the area involved, and the general social conditions, it is worth considering whether the Gennas in Chicago, or the Jameses in the Midwest, or the Gilzais of the North-west Frontier, were such an appalling continual menace as this one Scottish family of the Western Border.

The state of affairs looks even worse when regarded not from a family standpoint, but a geographical one. The Elliots were one of many robber families; Liddesdale was one of many robber’s roosts, though admittedly the worst by far. According to a list of bills against Liddesdale, dated April 30 1590, the reivers of that valley alone were riding an average of a raid a week through the winter of 1589–90. In that time they carried off more than 850 beasts, took sixty prisoners, wounded ten men, killed one, took insight of £200, and burned five houses.

If one adds in the previous year, Liddesdale’s total is swollen by another 600-odd beasts, four murders, twenty-four prisoners, and one town sacked.

It is quite a record, and from it and other lists of complaints—for it must be emphasised that the figures cited are not unusually high or out of the way—a different picture of the Border reiver emerges. He can be seen for what he very often was, not at all heroic, but a nasty, cruel, mean-spirited ruffian, who preferred the soft mark provided by small farmers, widows, and lonely steadings; who came in overwhelming force, destroyed wantonly, beat up and even killed if he was resisted, and literally stripped his victims of everything they had.

It is fair to quote from a detailed list of the goods taken by a band of thirty Crosers and Elliots in November 1589 from a home on the Middle March; apart from cattle and weapons, the robbers’ haul also included a woman’s kirtle and sleeves, kerchiefs, underclothes, sheets, a cauldron, a pan, shirts, and four “children’s coates”. A far cry from Sherwood and the legendary code of robbing the rich to give to the poor. Nor were such petty spoils the exclusive prey of the broken men and outlaws; this was the kind of work that such romantic champions as the Bold Buccleuch and Kinmont Willie were doing; the fact that they did it on a much greater scale lends them no dignity at all.

This is to look at reiving’s blackest side, and it is fatally easy to make the mistake of judging by modern standards, and to forget that, so far as the actual pillaging was concerned, no one thought it a matter for shame. A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the Borderer’s moral standards, and one is right to be sceptical of apologists; nevertheless, it is most important to appreciate the distinction, in the Border mind, between reiving, with its associated offences—blackmail, kidnapping, feud killing, and so on—on the one hand, and “ordinary” crime on the other. Robert Carey was one outsider who fully understood this distinction, and although he did not condone the reivers’ behaviour, he did try to explain it. “So have they (the Scots) been used to rob and spoil, and think it their inherytance, scorning all opposition”, he wrote, adding that “the English thief [is] as bad or worse than the Scot”. Most of us do not think of ourselves as criminals, but possibly there are things in our daily lives which we regard as our “inheritance” which will move future generations to critical disgust.

Crime which had nothing to do with reiving, however, was regarded by the Borderers much as other communities have always regarded it. Interesting evidence of this appears in Carey’s memoirs, when he mentions “2 gentlemen theeves that robbed and took purses from travellers in the highways (a theft that was never heard of in these parts before)”. Carey “got them betrayed”, and they were hanged at Newcastle.

This is not to argue, as some writers have done, that the reiver should be judged in a more sympathetic light than an ordinary criminal, but to point out that, if he is to be judged, his own standards of right and wrong should be taken into consideration. To assume that they were the same as those of even his fellow-Elizabethans would be a mistake.

5.The Liddel Water runs down from Liddesdale to Kershopefoot, where it is joined by the little Kershope Burn (right of picture). This was a favourite site for days of truce between the English West March and Liddesdale, and is almost the exact geographical centre of the whole West and Middle Border. The frontier line runs down the Kershope and then downstream along the Liddel; the stony shore in the right foreground is England, while the clump of trees beyond the burn stands in Scotland.

6. Hollows Tower, an Armstrong hold on the Esk, has lost its roof but is otherwise a well-preserved specimen of the Border peel. Johnnie Armstrong, the famous reiver, had a tower near Hollows village, but it has disappeared, and the present Hollows was probably built later in the sixteenth century.

7. Carlisle Castle, headquarters of the English West March Warden, and the strongest fortress in the Border country, is a massive hold of red stone which dominates the northern end of the city. Begun nearly nine hundred years ago by William Rufus, it has probably seen as much fighting as any place in Britain; in time of war it was the key bastion against Scottish invasion, and the stark, rugged lines of its architecture make no concessions to romantic beauty. Still, it was not impregnable, and Kinmont Willie was only one of the Borderers who broke out of it. Other temporary residents have included Edward I, Richard III, and Mary Queen of Scots. This view, taken from inside the old city, shows the main gateway (left) and the keep.

8. A reiver’s eye view of the English Middle March from the southern Cheviots just below the Border line, showing the empty tufted hill country typical of this part of the frontier. Redesdale lies beyond the hills in the distance, and the lower land between is the kind of “passage and hye way for the theefe” crossed by the East Teviotdale forayers.

Another common error about Border reiving is to suppose that one side was worse than the other. Most of the examples cited here are of Scottish raids against England; this is simply because the English records are far fuller, and provide more interesting details; if one reads through the colossal lists of raids contained in Elizabethan papers, without a proper background knowledge, one might conclude that poor inoffensive England was an unresisting prey of the predatory Scots. How untrue this would be is shown in the accounting prepared by young Scrope himself in September 1593, of the respective damages done by Scottish and English reivers in the Western Border.

Liddesdale, for once, had taken worse than it gave; for £3230 worth of damage done to England, it had suffered £8000 worth. The Scottish West March raiders had despoiled England to the tune of £6470, but in return had suffered £33,600 of loss. English maurauding had exceeded that of Scotland by the astounding total of almost £32,000 for that particular period.

But usually there was little to choose between the two, and it is more useful to consider the total damage listed by Scrope, which was over £50,000 worth—and this is for only one-third of the Border. Admittedly, the figure covers several years, but if one is extremely conservative and multiplies it only by ten to give an idea of what it means in modern values, we have a crime bill, for the Western Marches only, of half a million pounds.

Another estimate, made in 1596–7 by William Bowes, gives a figure, for all Scottish raids over a ten-year period, of £92,989 6s 1d, of which three-quarters was charged to Liddesdale and Teviotdale. A total, by our standards, of about a million pounds.

Reiving was a very big small business.

1. Dickie of Dryhope (or Driupp) is mentioned in the Ballad of Kinmont Willie as a principal in the raid on Carlisle Castle, and the slayer of “the fause Sakelde”. He is not mentioned, however, in the detailed list of the Carlisle raiders sent by young Scrope to Burghley (April 14 1596), so there is no reason to suppose he was there at all. The last mention of him is on March 7 1594, when at a Warden meeting at Kershopefoot he was stated to be no longer living in Liddesdale.

XIV
A parcel of rogues

The following are case-histories of three Border reivers, pieced together from the records of the time. They are incomplete, but they may be sufficient to give an idea of a typical raider’s activities, and show the kind of factual basis on which so many legends rest.

William Armstrong of Kinmont

Kinmont Willie, perhaps the best-known of Border reivers, deserved his reputation. He raided on the big scale, striking not at single farms and villages, but at whole areas, at the head of bands 300 strong. He liked to ride by day, usually eastward from his tower at Morton Rigg, which was right on the Border not far north of Carlisle. His favourite target was Tynedale.

The first of his raids recorded was against the Milburns in that valley, in August 1583, when Armstrong was probably in his forties. Eight separate villages were attacked, several houses burned, 800 cattle stolen, £200 worth of goods taken, six men killed, eleven wounded, and thirty prisoners carried off.

The following year he and Nebless Clem Croser were back on another day foray with 300 riders, lifting 1300 cattle, sixty horses, and £2000 worth of goods, burning sixty houses, and killing ten men.

In 1585 Kinmont Willie was occupied with raiding in his own country; he accompanied the Earl of Angus’s campaign against the Earl of Arran, and took the opportunity to pillage in Stirling. It was this raid that made his name, and turned it into a byword for violent crime. But his biggest raid of all occurred eight years later, when he was in Tynedale with 1000 men, carrying off more than 2000 beasts and £300 in spoil.

He seems to have been fairly quiet until 1596, when his famous capture and rescue from Carlisle Castle took place (see Chapter XLI), and after that some of the old fire died. Perhaps he was just getting old, but his raids thereafter were minor affairs. He took the Captain of Bewcastle and sixteen others prisoner in 1597, ransomed them, stole twenty-four horses, and committed some “slaughter”; the bill (charge) against him for this was fouled by confession—which means he pleaded guilty to it. At this time he was being raided himself, from the English West March, his house sacked twice and burned once, 300 of his beasts stolen, and two of his men killed. He fell into English hands again on one of these occasions, but was released.

By this time the former leader of the great day forays had declined to the joint command of an outlaw gang called Sandy’s Bairns; in 1600 he attacked the village of Scotby with 140 riders, burning, taking prisoners and over 100 cattle, and with a last spark of his old bravado, riding on to Carlisle the same evening with some “English disobedients”. They smashed in a few doors at the Rickergate, damaged the bridge chains, took some prisoners, and rode under the Castle wall roaring, “Upon them, upon them, a Dacre, a Dacre, a red bull, a red bull!” which caused some alarm; the citizens stood to arms and the beacon was lit, but presently the raiders retired, no doubt to sober up.

Next year the old ruffian was operating a protection racket at Scaleby, and doing a little in the way of illicit horse-trading and receiving stolen goods. In 1602 he rode his last foray, probably on Low and High Hesket, south of Carlisle. He was still alive two years later, and his four sons who had helped to get him out of Carlisle Castle in 1596, are frequently named in the later Border raids. But the old robber, full of years and dishonour, probably died in his bed.

Walter Scott of Harden

“Auld Wat” of Harden has been represented as the Falstaff of the Borders, a fierce, big-bellied humorous old rascal who is supposed to have passed a haystack on returning from a raid and muttered: “Aye, if ye had fower legs ye wouldnae stand there lang.” A number of Border myths are connected with him, and possibly they have some truth, but the bare facts of his foraying are as follows.

He and a handful of Elliots stole two mares and a foal from the Gelt in July 1595, and sixty head of cattle from Triermain two months later. In the following year, with the same Elliots, he ran a day foray in Gilsland with 400 men, took 300 cattle, twenty horses, burned twenty houses, “taking and burning [sic] gold money apperrell worth £400” and “mutilating” several persons. Another raid yielded him 300 beasts and the spoil of two houses, worth £100.

He raided Bellingham in 1597 with more than 300 horse, killed three men, and carried off 400 head, the March being too weak to pursue him. “With shame and grief I speak it,” wrote Eure, “the Scotts went away unfought withall.”

Auld Wat was a principal in Kinmont Willie’s rescue, and in his preliminary report young Scrope mistakenly credited him with being the actual ring-leader. Yet although he is referred to as Buccleuch’s right-hand man, he does not appear to have been well known south of the frontier. Scrope refers to him as “one Wattie Harden”, and Eure even gave his surname as Elliot. But he was important enough on the Scottish side to have been involved in the Raid of Falkland in 1592, in which the wild Earl of Bothwell tried to capture King James VI;¹

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