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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,
(#ulink_07ed58d7-ecd7-598e-9051-f153edec1ef3) 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”,
(#ulink_93041315-363b-5ee7-b71c-9fefd87321a4) 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”.
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. (#ulink_a495e709-4965-506b-a4e6-f00e4edc2844) Hume Brown.
2. (#ulink_ef1ccd0d-0211-56a2-add8-d9098b42d09d) Ridpath, p. 173. 3. Ibid.
PART TWO (#ulink_fc08fd43-8db0-5484-b6b2-80996ed9247b)
IV (#ulink_d0bee543-68ea-556f-901f-d2e07b595c9d)
Border country (#ulink_d0bee543-68ea-556f-901f-d2e07b595c9d)
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,
(#ulink_fdffd0f6-ada2-57e8-b543-c14c292dde82) put it, if Hume stopped the Merse farmers selling to Berwick, “we need no other siege”. It is significant that Carey, writing to Burghley
(#ulink_679fe8eb-9358-54ea-bfd4-d302e48a7493) 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 Hunsdon
(#ulink_3e31845c-4d0c-5953-8910-40740e823e37) 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.
(#ulink_292fef52-e6c8-57a1-bd81-03af6a3be431) 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 trod
(#ulink_1f42b4e4-e981-548a-b17d-7f50c61194b6) 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.
(#ulink_a8cb33e8-796c-5d63-9b9a-0610543fa904) 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. (#ulink_ef10057b-9508-5f87-b422-aad358c2bba2) 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. (#ulink_ef10057b-9508-5f87-b422-aad358c2bba2) William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–98), principal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and the leading English statesman of the day.
3. (#ulink_ce70a886-9f91-5dd7-a504-af261339cd4f) 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. (#ulink_d68c5056-76d1-5c98-a34c-acafe122a1d4) 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. (#ulink_c914a1d0-48c5-56f5-aa9a-80cfe8014c95) Hot trod—lawful pursuit of reivers.
6. (#ulink_a15c5788-1537-5bf4-834b-0196ef350f32) 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 (#ulink_4a18a84f-1645-5340-989e-63fbaa74ea9e)
“A martial kind of men” (#ulink_4a18a84f-1645-5340-989e-63fbaa74ea9e)
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;
(#ulink_f4b0006a-aeab-5e96-89a8-3248e4bb415a) 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,
