The Reivers E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 616

Beschreibung

From the early fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the Anglo-Scottish borderlands witnessed one of the most intense periods of warfare and disorder ever seen in modern Europe. As a consequence of near-constant conflict between England and Scotland, Borderers suffered at the hands of marauding armies, who ravaged the land, destroying crops, slaughtering cattle, burning settlements and killing indiscriminately. Forced by extreme circumstances, many Borderers took to reiving to ensure the survival of their families and communities, and for the best part of 300 years, countless raiding parties made their way over the border. The story of The Reivers is one of survival, stealth, treachery, ingenuity and deceit, expertly brought to life in Alistair Moffat's acclaimed book.

Leseprobe

The Reivers

The Story of the Border Reivers

ALISTAIR MOFFAT

This eBook edition published in 2011 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2007 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2007 Illustration © Liz Hanson 2007

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-115-6

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

I have spent many happy months filming in the Borders, making the series on the Border Reivers for Border Television, and this book is for all those who helped me do it and have had such a grand time doing it. I hope that Fiona Armstrong, Terry Black, Annie Buckland, Chris Buckland, Paul Caddick, Livvy Ellis, Valerie Lyon, Louise Maving, Paddy Merrall, Eric Robson, Eric Scott-Parker, Allan Tarn and Ken Wynne all enjoy the book as much as I’ve enjoyed working with them.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Part I

1 Moonlight

2 The Lords of the Names

3 The Landscape of Larceny

4 The Condition of Men

Part II

5 Before Flodden

6 The Wild Frontier

7 Riding Times

Envoi

Appendixes

1 The Border Ballads

2 The Names

3 Kings and Queens

4 How the Ferniehurst Kerrs Stopped Reiving and Became Part of the British Establishment

5 The Common Riding Year

Bibliography

Index

Also Available

List of Illustrations

The lonely farm of Ovenshank in Liddesdale, the quintessential reiver valley

A hardy Galloway bullock in the foothills of the central ranges of the Cheviots

The ruins of a tower house at Edgerston, at the head of the Jed Valley, below the Carter Bar

Falside, in the central ranges of the Cheviots

A hailstorm over Cheviot

Carewoodrig Valley

Late winter on Howman Law in the Cheviots

Sourhope at the head of the Bowmont Valley in the Cheviots

The Cheviots just before a winter storm at the head of the Jed Valley

The modern road from Langholm to Newcastleton through the Tarras Moss

The Tarras Burn

Late spring on the high pasture of the Lammermuirs, in the Allan Valley

Spring in Upper Teviotdale

Late autumn, after the harvest in fertile Berwickshire with snow on the Cheviots to the south

Wild country at the head of Annandale, the lair of the Johnstones

The Devil’s Beeftub at the head of Annandale

Goldilands Tower in Upper Teviotdale, a Scott stronghold

The ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, near St Boswells

River mist over Berwick-upon-Tweed

Hodden’s fertile fields as they are now

Smailholm Tower and its commanding views over the Tweed Valley

Even in a watery sunshine Hermitage Castle still looms

The remains of the Hume’s castle inside the walls of the folly now known as Hume Castle

The Victorian Mercat Cross at Jedburgh, the site of the royal herald’s humiliation

Mary, Queen of Scots’ House at Jedburgh

Norham Castle standing guard over the Tweed

Berwick-upon-Tweed and its walls

Greenknowe Tower near Kelso

Modern hill farming in Upper Teviotdale

Limiecleuch Farm in Teviotdale shows how even in summer, the land looks inhospitable

Evening at Priesthaugh Farm in the Cheviots

Sunset over the Border Hills

Acknowledgements

First I want to thank Hugh Andrew of Birlinn for asking me to write this. I have greatly enjoyed working with him and his team. Too rare in publishing, they are dynamic, business-like and cheery. Birlinn makes authors feel good, even important, even if they’re not particularly. And that’s also too rare a trick in publishing. Thanks to Graeme Leonard for a brisk and painless edit, and to all my patient readers. Walter Elliot had something of a family interest in this one. And finally my thanks to lovely Liz Hanson for her superb photographs. They are an adornment – as ever.

Part I

1

Moonlight

The night wind whistled out of the west, sudden squalls spattering the ramparts, keeping the sentries moving, stamping their feet against the November chill. When the clouds scudded away into the formless mirk and the sky cleared, the moon lit the pale winter landscape. Bewcastle Waste stretched away to the north of the old fort, and beyond it lay Liddesdale, Teviotdale and trouble.

Leaning on their spears, the sentries peered into the darkness, searching the horizon, scanning the dark heads of the fells. Sometimes a shape seemed to move but another pair of eyes saw it was nothing. The cold and the wet – and the sleepless hour – could numb the senses and make a fool of the most experienced soldier. The Captain had set four troopers on the night watch but allowed only one brazier between them. While two warmed themselves, the others walked the rampart, watching for raiders, for horsemen who might appear out of nowhere, from any direction. But it was a foul night, surely even the most desperate thieves on the Border would stay snug by their fire.

Ten miles to the north, silently snaking through the hills, they were coming. Walter Scott of Buccleuch led 120 riders up over the pass at Whitrope, their ponies looking for the glint of the burn and the narrow path beside it. There was none of the martial jingle of heavily armed cavalry as the column wound its way quietly down through the willow scrub to the mosses of Liddesdale. Sodden now, but much better than nothing, cloaks were wound tight against the midnight chill. Looming out of the darkness, off to their right, Scott and his captains could see the black shape of the castle at Hermitage. No lights showed and if there was a watch, it was only nominal and probably looking the other way. The riders stayed on the east bank of the burn and moved silently on. No patrol would come out of the castle gate but it would not do to embarrass the Keeper by making the presence of a passing raiding party obvious. Only a short way downstream Whithaugh and the tryst with the Armstrongs were waiting.

At the end of September, having left them out on the fells as late as he dared, Willie Routledge and his herd-laddies had ingathered their cattle for the winter. The high summer pastures of the Bewcastle fells had begun to die back and the ground around the sikes and burns had churned to clinging clatch. After cropping for winter hay, Routledge’s inbye fields had recovered and his cows would keep their summer condition on through the turn of the year and maybe beyond, if only the incessant rains of last winter would hold off. And his prized ponies were fat and sleek, swinging big grass-bellies in their winter coats.

All four sentries heard it. Each looked up and out to the north. And then at each other. Birdcalls in the dead of a winter’s night? Only when their roost is disturbed. Was it a fox – or something more? The sentries waited for clouds to clear the full moon, holding their breath for another shriek from out in the waste, straining to focus in the formless dark. The Captain slept warm in his chamber; who would be bold enough to rattle down the rickety wooden stairs and wake him because a bird had called? Moments passed. No other alarm. Whatever it was had moved on, nothing of any moment. It came on to rain, again.

Sim’s Jock Armstrong was in no doubt. Simplest was best, particularly on a filthy night like this. The old reiver wheeled his pony to come alongside Scott’s, his eyes were hooded by the dripping rim of his steel bonnet but his rasping voice was clear enough. Scott and his riders should cross the border at Kershopefoot and then strike directly south towards the Bewcastle Fells. And they should come back on exactly the same track. The ponies would find their own scent and their own hoofprints in the dark. And once they had regained the Scottish side, everything should be left to the Armstrongs. They would be waiting, and not even Scott would see them as he passed. It was their ground and they knew its every brake and bush. By early morning all would be done, one way or another, and it would be done well, would it not? Sim’s Jock and his riders would earn their cut. Walter Scott smiled and nodded. The board was set – let the game begin.

In the hay barn, the Routledge’s dogs dozed in their own body-warmth, cocking an occasional ear as rats scratched and scuttled in the ratters. Bielded from the breeze by the farm steading, most of the ponies were quiet, some sleeping on their feet, all waiting patiently for the night to pass. And the black cattle snuffled in small groups, nosing around the inbye fields, nibbling now and again at the cold and bitter winter grass. One or two splashed across the burn to the farther pasture. The beasts at night somehow seemed peaceful to Willie Routledge, their steaming warmth consoling, their herding instincts a comfort. He and his boys had had a good summer with plenty of calves to sell on at Brampton Market and some to keep through the winter. Up on the shielings, the summertowns, the sun had shone and the good grass grown up through the yellow tussocks of the old. Next year would be even better. If only they could get through the long dark winter stretching out before them.

Towards midnight mist crept over the moonlit landscape, muffling sound, its damp chill seeping through the sentries’ warmest cloaks. Beyond the ramparts the world slept, cold and still under a grey blanket. Only wakefulness kept the men warm; it was easy to lean on a spear and nod into a doze. But to allow that was to numb the bones for the rest of the long night. Activity, doing their duty, was what helped and after all Bewcastle Fort had been built and regularly repaired for good reason. It guarded a well-trodden byway into the west marches of England. To its south were vulnerable farmsteads, valuable herds and poorly defended villages.

They were in England now. Nothing could disguise their purpose as Scott’s riders kicked their ponies on up the rising ground above the Kershope Burn. They would circle well to the west of Bewcastle Fort. Its new Captain, Steven Ellis, was his name, was reckoned to be more than usually anxious to please his masters in London, old Francis Walsingham and the rest. No courtly fawner or sponger, he was a professional soldier who saw his posting to Elizabeth’s northern frontier as an opportunity to distinguish himself in action rather than words, to become part of what the Warden of the East Marches, Robert Carey, called ‘a stirring world’. Ellis’ troopers were also newcomers to the Border and none had yet compromised their loyalty. Time would surely change that, but for the moment Walter Scott would be cautious, not wishing to alert the Bewcastle garrison and have them clatter out of the fort and after him. Willie Routledge’s cows were what he and his men wanted, and anything else they could carry off besides.

Scouts reported back. Dismounting, tying their ponies in the thickets down by the burn, they had crept up a ridge above the farm, seen no light, no watchers, noted that the herd was grazing the inbye fields and noticed some handsome nags in amongst them. Speed and stealth now. Scott’s men were well armed, bristling with swords, daggers, pistols and spears. They wore steel caps and thick padded jerkins while their captains and a few others were protected by backs and breasts armour. It was not Willie Routledge and his sons who worried the riders but the long road home and the real possibility that the Bewcastle garrison would give chase and that they might have to cut their way through to the border and beyond.

Despite carrying 18 to 20 stone of kit and man, the ponies moved nimbly over the tussocks towards the farmhouse, keeping it between them and the cattle. Suddenness would unsettle the beasts and raise the house. Scott had split his force. Most waited to round up the cows and oxen and catch the ponies while a dozen dismounted. With Scott leading, they crept towards the thatched farmhouse like foxes.

Too experienced and too wily for needless drama, Scott lifted the latch and tiptoed inside. By the glow of the dying fire his men could see the sleeping family become restive – until their leader woke them by holding his pistol to Willie Routledge’s head. A moment’s uproar was immediately suppressed by some rough handling. All were quickly dragged and bundled into a corner of the room as Scott went out to supervise the roundup. The men raked around the farmhouse for valuables as Routledge swore and cursed at them. One pulled out a cowering, squealing daughter by the hair, forced her to kneel by the fire and held a dagger to her throat to encourage her father and terrified family to keep quiet.

Out in the fields the raiders caught up the ponies in halters and gathered the cattle into a tight pack. Once they were ready to move off, Scott’s men tied up all of the Routledges and doused their fire. Let them shiver and make no signal. Anything to slow down the likely pursuit. Across rough ground and in the winter dark, cows were slow to drive and one or two would slip through the screen of ponies and need to be herded back.

All had been managed quickly and with scarcely a raised voice. No sound carried as far as the ramparts at Bewcastle, its sentries saw nothing amiss in the November night. But news was travelling. Young Edward Routledge had wriggled free of his bonds, untied the others and while his father and his brothers began quickly to build a beacon to blaze and raise the countryside, he ran, stumbling and falling, over the moorland to the soldiers and their fort.

Scott did not delay, riding up and down, hurrying his men. They had lifted about 40 head of cows and oxen and 20 ponies, most of them mares. The Routledge farm had yielded little in the way of valuables and no man was over-encumbered. But goading and whacking the lowing cows into a trot was difficult – and noisy. At this pace the border was perhaps an hour away, the dawn another hour beyond that.

Pinpointed in the distance, Edward saw the sentries’ brazier and began breathlessly to holler and whoop. By the time he had scrambled over the old Roman ditches and ramparts and reached the outer gate at Bewcastle Fort, its Captain was awake and buckling on his breastplate. Over to the west the Routledge’s beacon crackled into life and lit the night sky. Within a few minutes 40 troopers were in the saddle and Edward on his way back to the farm with spare mounts. It was Scott they were after. Routledge knew for certain, and he would most likely be on the trail to the Kershope Burn and the Scottish side.

Even though those leading the stolen ponies could make better time, Walter Scott knew that his raiding party needed to keep all its strength together. If caught up, he would turn and fight while some of his riders kept the cattle from stampede. If they scattered into the darkness and the unfenced moorland, what was the point? Scott rode at the rear, often turning and straining to listen, screening out the grunt and low of the beasts as the herd moved northwards, nearer to Scotland and safety. Not that the frontier itself would protect him, government officials on both sides had the right to pursue raiders across it regardless of jurisdiction. Scott wanted to reach the Kershope Burn because the Armstrongs waited there, well hidden.

Captain Ellis and his troopers hurried along the trail, not far behind and not waiting for Routledge and his boys or anyone else. The rain was holding off, the moon glowed pale as it set and the ponies would somehow find good enough ground to trot. Often they could make out the hoofprints of cows and horses in the muddy sikes. They were gaining, closing fast on the raiders.

Willie Routledge and his sons followed on quickly through the half-light, hoping to catch up the Captain’s troop before they engaged with Scott and his men. Willie hated the taunt, ‘a Routledge – every man’s prey’, and was determined to show his family was no soft touch.

Against the paler blue of the dawning sky, on the ridge above the Kershope Burn, Ellis could make out the silhouettes of the raiding party and the cattle clearly. And just faintly he could hear them. The captain would catch them all, red-handed, as they stumbled downhill and across the water. His men spurred on.

Scott could hear them coming. Some of the Bewcastle troopers had booted their ponies into a canter. Silly. Could easily break a leg. But they might be lucky and be upon them soon. The leading raiders were skittering down to the burn, and breaking his silence, Scott roared for support to come up to him on the ridge. The cows splashed over the burn, riders whacking them on. It was difficult to know how close Ellis was. When all were across safely and moving into the woods on the Scottish side, Scott turned his men downhill and followed. At that moment the Bewcastle troop burst out of the mirk, only 40 yards away. Now at the banks of the burn, Scott’s men scrambled over. But as Ellis’ troop found the level ground, scores of riders erupted from nowhere. The Armstrongs had broken cover. Four Bewcastle men were immediately shot out of the saddle. Many others were badly wounded and the troop routed before their Captain had time to rally them to him. Careless of the grey light and the uneven ground, his men scattered in all directions.

Scott turned in the saddle to look back at the melee. The Armstrong ambush had been expertly sprung, the cows and horses were theirs and a good night’s work had been done. On the high ground above the Kershope Burn Willie Routledge and his sons sat on their ponies and watched. If only the young Captain had waited, Willie would have told him why the raiders had returned on the same road. He could have warned them what was waiting.

These things happened. In November 1588 Walter Scott of Buccleuch rode out of his stronghold of Branxholme, near Hawick, with 120 reivers. He had made a tryst with the Armstrongs of Whithaugh in Liddesdale. Here is the full text of the complaint later made:

Captain Ellis and the surname of the Routledges in Bewcastle complain upon the said Laird of Buccleuch, the Laird of Chesame, the Laird of Whithaugh and their accomplices to the number of 120 horsemen arrayed with jacks, steel caps, spears, guns, lances and pistols, swords and daggers purposely mustered by Buccleuch, who broke the house of Willie Routledge, took 40 cows and oxen, 20 horses and mares, and also laid an ambush to slay the soldiers and others who should follow the fray, whereby they cruelly slew and murdered Mr Rowden, Nichol Tweddle, Jeffrey Nartbie and Edward Stainton, soldiers; maimed sundry others and drove 12 horses and mares, whereof they crave redress.

The raid is the core of this story. It is the essence of all the extraordinary events which took place from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century on either side of the border between England and Scotland. Thousands of raids like Walter Scott’s foray to Bewcastle were run, often several on one winter’s night. They formed the focus of a unique criminal society. Over an enormous area of Britain, perhaps a twelfth of the landmass of the island, there existed a people who lived beyond the laws of England and Scotland, who ignored the persistent efforts of central government to impose order, who took their social form and norms from the ancient conventions of tribalism, who invented ever more sophisticated variants on theft, cattle rustling, murder and extortion – and gave them names, like ‘blackmail’. And they spoke and sang beautiful, sad poetry and told a string of stirring, unforgettable stories.

In the modern historical period, the tale of the Border Reivers is a tale without parallel in all of western Europe.

2

The Lords of the Names

Queens were executed, monasteries swept into oblivion and a Reformation forced upon his people by Henry VIII of England in his desperation to father a male heir and continue the Tudor line. And once Prince Edward had been safely delivered, this most brutal of English kings began to cast around for a bride for his boy. When James V of Scotland died in 1542 leaving his baby daughter, Mary, as queen, negotiations were soon underway. By July 1543 the Treaty of Greenwich had contracted a marriage between Prince Edward and Queen Mary. She was not yet one year old.

Almost immediately it began to unravel. The Scottish Parliament rejected the terms of the treaty and the nobility divided into pro- and anti-English factions. Henry VIII responded with what Walter Scott called ‘the rough wooing’. Punitive expeditions rampaged through the Border countryside, burning and killing across a wide swathe, and in September 1547 a powerful English army drew up in battle order at Pinkie near Musselburgh. The Scots were no match; ten thousand were said to have been slaughtered, fifteen hundred taken prisoner and those who wisely fled the field were pursued up to the gates of Edinburgh.

As is often the case, it was a battle which need not have been fought. Although the English had vastly superior numbers, that fact was fast becoming their most pressing problem. Quartermasters were having great difficulty in supplying such a large army in the field and some historians believe that if the Scots had simply skirmished around them, harrying their communications in classic reiver fashion, then the English would have been forced into a humiliating retreat after only a few days. But rashness, and the urging of Scottish priests (who did not wish their national church to come under the control of York or Canterbury), drove the Scots captains into fighting a pitched battle they were odds-on to lose.

Borderers and their heidsmen must have understood all of this and it no doubt informed their actions. They fought on both sides, and it appears that the Scots contingent manoeuvred themselves opposite the English. A sharp-eyed observer noticed that in addition to their crosses of St Andrew and St George, both sets of Borderers wore a great deal of extra identification; kerchiefs tied like armbands and letters embroidered on their hats. Worse, their national badges were sewn on so loosely that ‘a puff of wind might have blown them from their breasts’. But most embarrassing was the discovery that, standing within a spear’s length of each other, in the midst of a furious battle, Scots and English Borderers were talking to each other. When they realised that they had been observed, both lots made some show of running at each other and ‘they strike few strokes but by assent and appointment’.

It must have been a remarkable sight. Amid the din and clatter of battle, as others fought and died around them, two groups of nominally opposing soldiers making a pantomime out of deadly warfare. People who knew each other well had turned up at Pinkie to be seen to do their duty for the opposing sides but were actually determined to get through the battle, whichever way it went. For the truth is that it was not their fight.

Foreign policy, the aspirations of Henry VIII and the ambitions of the anti-English party in Scotland mattered very little to these men. Names were everything, nationality came a long way behind and loyalty to factions within a nation an even more distant third.

HENRY AND THE CLAP

Syphilis made landfall in Europe at Barcelona in 1493, having travelled across the Atlantic as an early import from America on board the Nina, one of Christopher Columbus’ ships. It spread like wildfire and at some point in his extended amorous adventures, Henry VIII of England almost certainly caught it. The disease made it difficult for him to father an heir (and contributed to his dynasty’s barrenness) and propelled Britain into all sorts of political convulsions. Not the least of these were the tremendously destructive punitive raids of the ‘rough wooing’. The sixteenth-century epidemic of syphilis made sexual puritanism popular – as a matter of self-preservation. Previously popular in all gender combinations as a form of greeting, kissing on the lips was replaced by the safer handshake, and the fashion for wigs was encouraged. Sufferers from syphilis often lost all their hair.

Names were what made the Border Reivers who they were – in all important senses. Armstrongs, Elliots, Kers and Maxwells gave unhesitating loyalty to their surnames, what was a huge extended family in some cases. On the English side the Carletons, the Fenwicks, the Forsters and the Robsons felt greater affinity with the Scottish riding families than with those who lived to the south of them. And governments in Edinburgh and London may have done as they pleased but where the heidsman of a name led, those who had the same name saddled their ponies and followed.

These were powerful instincts. Few fought fiercer than family bands. When fathers and sons, brothers and cousins rode side by side, none turned aside and many found courage when the names of their blood needed them at their back. Astute commanders understood these bonds and in battles or skirmishes they always set the older and more experienced men in front, believing that honour and valour flowed down the generations to the younger men behind. Pitched battles between surnames were always the cruellest and bloodiest fights. When the Maxwells were cut to pieces by the Johnstones at Dryfe Sands near Lockerbie in 1593, the slaughter was unrelenting. More than 700 Maxwells were killed and Robert Johnstone of Raecleugh bloodied his lance on that terrible day. He was 11 years old.

Robert must have been a big laddie for his years, able to wrap long legs around his pony’s belly and direct it, and also to couch the butt of his lance without being knocked out of the saddle on impact. ‘If he’s big enough, he’s auld enough’ is a comment still heard in Border rugby dressing rooms when a young player is brought into the team. And on 6th December 1593 the Johnstones needed every young lad, every rider they could muster. In pursuit of a deadly feud between the two names, the Maxwells had summoned a huge force. Two thousand horsemen rode with their heidsman, Lord Maxwell, and they came to lay siege to the Johnstone tower at Lochwood.

When news of the advancing army – for that is what it was –reached James Johnstone, he moved quickly and determined to fight like the reiver he was. He knew no other way to prevent the extermination of his name. Able to put only four hundred men in the saddle, Johnstone could not confront Maxwell in open country. His riders would be outflanked and rolled up and fatally surrounded. Instead, he laid a reiver’s ambush. At a narrow place on the road, with plenty of cover on each side, the Johnstones hid themselves. When enough of the Maxwell vanguard had trotted into the trap, it was suddenly sprung. Roaring their war-cries, the Johnstones spurred their ponies and tore into their enemy’s flanks. So furious was the charge that it drove the leading Maxwell riders backwards, forcing them to turn into the midst of the main party following them. Ponies reared and kicked, men were bucked off, weapons dropped, tangled and trampled and a murderous scrummage of confusion turned Maxwell’s two thousand into a formless, panicking rabble.

As the Johnstones charged again and again, the battle became a rout and riders poured into the streets of Lockerbie, fighting as they went. Maxwells were trapped in narrow places, hacked at, killed and ridden down. Blood ran in the gutters, spattered on the faces of the living and the dying. Men screamed as they were cornered and skewered by lance and sword-thrust or their limbs were cut off and their bodies butchered unrecognisable. The Johnstones fought like furies for more than their lives – the very existence of their name was at stake on that awful December day. Extermination was what they desperately feared – and to visit it upon the Maxwells if they could.

Dryfe Sands was one of the last battles to be joined in the Borders and one of the most ferocious. And it was fought for the sake of a name, the very bedrock of reiver society.

LOCKERBIE LICKS

When horsemen fought each other head-on, troops of cavalry charging straight towards each other, it was a combination of resolve, numbers and heavier horses which usually won the day. The armies of Islam swept through North Africa and up into Spain and southern France in the eighth century. When the Arab cavalry reached the River Loire in AD 732, they came up against a new enemy. Charles Martel, the Mayor of the royal palace, had gathered a squadron of big horses, what became known as heavy cavalry. Bracing themselves in their stirrups, they charged the lighter Arab cavalry and knocked them off their feet. Islam was driven back to the Pyrenees and eventually across the Straits of Gibraltar. The small Arab ponies were tough, fast and nimble but entirely unsuited to pitched battle on good ground. Just like the Border Reivers. They too were light horsemen, what were known as ‘prickers’, good at harrying, skirmishing and wearing down a more cumbrous enemy, always fighting shy of taking them on upfront. On a broken battlefield Border horsemen were deadly, pouring through gaps in the line, quickly creating a melée of close-quarter fighting. At the Battle of Dryfe Sands the Johnstones got in amongst the Maxwells and inflicted terrible casualties, particularly on those fighting on foot. ‘Get in amongst them!’ is still shouted from the terracing at Border League rugby matches. Even on small Galloway Nags a horseman was always crucially higher than an infantryman, slashing downwards with a sword or using the pony’s momentum to drive a lance forward. Many at Dryfe Sands suffered bad head and facial injuries from what became known as ‘Lockerbie Licks’, a passing backhanded cut at an opponent on foot – delivered with great venom.

The tribal surnames and their feral power were very old, reaching back across millennia into the mists of prehistory. When pioneer family bands came north after the end of the last ice age, and hunted, trapped and gathered a wild harvest, they probably enjoyed customary rights over wide swathes of the ancient wildwood. As farming pinned growing populations to more defined areas on the early map of the Borders, the beginnings of the surnames slowly began to form. DNA studies show tremendously long lineages, particularly in rural areas and many Border families of the sixteenth century had been on their land since a time out of mind. Of course, new people came, others moved or were removed but the balance of the human landscape stayed much as it was for a hundred generations or more. When men fought hard to keep or protect their land, they fought with all their courage for their history, and their name. They were seen as indivisible, the one impossible without the other.

Very early in the history of the Borders an old fault-line repeatedly divided communities. Hillmen and plainsmen had long led different styles of life. How the shepherd and the ploughman grew their food was shaped by geography and climate, but the distinctions were rarely absolute. Almost all farmers cultivated the ground and husbanded some beasts and the shepherd likewise. It was a question of degree. But the ploughmen of the flat and fertile plains of Berwickshire and the middle Tweed Valley saw themselves as different from the shepherds of Liddesdale in many ways – and they complained about them. In 1569 the lairds of the eastern and middle marches asserted that while they themselves were peaceable, the thieves of the western ranges were not. In a memorandum to the Scottish Privy Council they insisted that they must be controlled and made to behave like civilised men. And in case anyone missed the point, they supplied a black list of the surnames of the worst of them. And there were a few – all Armstrongs, Batesons, Bells, Crosiers, Elliots, Glendinnings, Hendersons, Irvines, Johnstones, Nixons, Routledges and Thomsons. In all this there is more than a whiff of superiority, the sense that the men of Liddesdale, Ewesdale, Annandale and Eskdale were little more than savages.

LIONEL AND TONY

Recent research suggests that men who bear the same surname are likely to be relatives. Lionel Blair and Tony Blair? Analyses of DNA testing of pairs of British males with the same surname shows that 25 per cent are direct if distant relatives. The Y chromosome passed from fathers to sons is the genetic link. The rarer the surname the greater the chance of men bearing it being related. Border Reivers knew all this anyway – but probably would have been appalled that the police plan to use the data to track down criminals.

For their part the hillmen found their lives more defined and constrained by geography. Over the valuable and accessible lands of the eastern plains the winds of social change might more easily blow. But in an upland valley, with one track in and one track out, there was less traffic of every sort and the year was shaped by the movement of flocks and herds, the time-hallowed journeys of transhumance. The communities of the hills were more conservative, perhaps closer-knit and more intimately tribal than those down in the valley bottoms and the broad fields of the east.

The herdsmen who moved their beasts around the flanks of the Cheviots and the hills and moors north of the Hexham Gap had more in common with each other than with the plainsmen who farmed the lower ground. The distinction between English and Scottish mattered much less. This is an important facet of the story of the Border Reivers. Since the earliest records were kept, the tribes of the northern Pennines and of the Cheviots and Southern Uplands allied themselves against the Roman invader. The Brigantes and the Selgovae and their satellites united their warbands in an attempt to keep some independence. Part of the reasoning behind Hadrian’s Wall was to drive a firebreak between them, prevent them from reinforcing each other along the hill trails which were so dangerous to patrol. Fifteen hundred years later, when the governments in Edinburgh and London tried to exert control, the instincts of the hillmen were little changed.

FOUR AND TWENTY

Until well into the nineteenth century Cumbrian shepherds counted in Old Welsh: yan, tan, tedderte, medderte, pump (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in English, or Arabic). When sheep were being accounted for on the high fells, Welsh was still shouted against the wind. Different valleys had slight variations; Coniston shepherds shouted tedderte while Borrowdale used tethera. It is an astonishing survival showing the deep conservatism of hill communities. And it is unlikely to have survived only in Cumbria. Mostly unlettered men, the shepherds of the Border hills probably counted as their ancestors did – and for many centuries after English was spoken in the valleys below. Like all Celtic languages Old Welsh used 20-base arithmetic. It reckons 2 x 20 for 40, 4 x 20 for 80 and so on. Memories of this habit lasted on into the twentieth century when old people used a Celtic word order. Instead of 24, they would say 4 and 20. The origins of 20-base counting are obvious and straightforward – the number of human fingers and toes. With their Vs and Xs Roman numerals look as though they might have a different derivation – but they do not. I is the simple symbol of one finger held up, V is from the notch between thumb and forefinger when a whole hand of five is shown and X is when two forefingers are crossed to signify all ten fingers and thumbs linked.

There are some similarities with the society of the Highland clans to the far north. Heidsmen in the Borders appear to have exercised great authority, not unlike the autocratic rule of clan chiefs. Some surnames, like the Moffats, sometimes had no heidsman, and perhaps for the avoidance of dispute, chose to acknowledge another. At the time of the Battle of Dryfe Sands the Moffats saw James Johnstone as their superior and no doubt horsemen of that surname hacked and killed Maxwells in the lanes of Lockerbie. There were many ‘graynes’ or branches of the Scott family, but Scott of Buccleuch was their unchallenged leader. And when Lord Maxwell summoned his small army of 2,000 riders in 1593, by no means all bore his name – although they were related. Other graynes, such as the Crichtons and the Douglases, often rode in his forays.

These bonds of the blood were reciprocal. In return for unquestioningly saddling his pony and buckling on his sword at a moment’s notice, a man might expect to work his land as a secure tenant and enjoy the protection of his heidsman. In fact men who found themselves outside these interlocking relationships, for whatever good reason, could enter into a contract with a heidsman. Known as manrent, this arrangement was not common but it did demonstrate the power of the name. And a name was not something to be without in the hills and valleys of the sixteenth-century Border country.

The sense of belonging, of pride and confidence in being an Elliot, a Turnbull, a Selby or a Bell peeps through the records of the time again and again. The Captain of Berwick, the great Elizabethan fortress-town guarding the east coast road, complained that the local recruits for his garrison were ‘mutinous and insubordinate to their constables, who are little above their own rank. Being of great clans and surnames, this encourages their obstinacy’.

When obstinacy shaded into excess, heidsmen could threaten the ultimate sanction. They could condemn men to be disnamed, to be removed from the surname and cast into outlawry. In the Border country disorder became so chronic in the sixteenth century that central government was forced to rely upon heidsmen controlling their people directly. By making solemn promises and sometimes giving up hostages, the lords of the names retained an independent ability to enforce good behaviour amongst their people. And if their people continued to misbehave and promises and pledges (the term most often used for hostages) were repeatedly broken or forfeited, then the heidsmen were compelled to disname the persistent offenders. The process sometimes called ‘putting to the horn’ involved a public declaration that certain men were no longer who they used to be or might claim to be. They had lost their name and become ‘broken men’ or outlaws, that is, outside the laws of Scotland and, more importantly, the laws of their heidsman. So great was this loss that many broken men formed gangs, thereby creating a surrogate surname. ‘Sandy’s Bairns’ was one such gang of thugs and they mounted raids on both sides of the border in the 1590s. After he had been cast into outlawry – no mean feat for an already lawless surname, Kinmont Willie Armstrong appeared at the head of a notorious gang known as ‘Kinmont’s Bairns’.

BALEFIRE

‘Bale’ in Old English originally meant pain or woe, and a balefire burned at the death of a leading person, a chieftain, even a king. They were lit on hilltops so that the message of an important death could be quickly transmitted. The modern meaning is related to ‘ball’ and describes a bundle, normally of hay or straw. In an unexpected way these two quite separate meanings combined at the time of the Border Reivers. As early as the fifteenth century there existed a sophisticated warning system for the lighting of balefires. Here is a set of instructions in early Scots. Some of the words sound an echo of fifteenth-century Border dialect:

A baile is warnyng of their cumyng, quhat power whatever thai be of. Twa bailes togedder at anis, thai cumyng in deide. Fower balis, ilk ane besyde uther and all at anys as fower candills sal be suthfast knowledge that thai ar of gret power and menys.

in English:

The [burning] of a bale is warning of their coming, whatever size [the force] might be. Two bales [burnt] together at the same time means that they are certainly coming. Four bales, each beside the other and [burnt] all at once like four candles are a sign of certain knowledge that they are of great power and menace.

It could all go horribly wrong. The balefire system was revived in 1803-4 when Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to invade Britain. At Hume Castle a lookout was certain he could see one blazing near Berwick. In a state of high excitement he fired his bundles, and all over the Borders other balefires crackled into life. As in an episode of ‘Dad’s Army’ volunteers pulled on boots and uniforms and hurried to their muster-points, no doubt grabbing their muskets as they scrambled out the door. The countryside was in uproar and at any moment Napoleon’s cuirassiers were expected to come clattering along the Berwick road, tricolours flying. They did not. No one did. It was all a ghastly mistake. What the hapless lookout on Hume Castle had seen was the everyday work of some Northumberland charcoal-burners. One of their mounds had burned out of control, flames licking into the night sky. What happened to the lookout is not recorded, but he will not have been popular and never allowed to forget what happened.

Broken men could be bold. So many regularly met in the streets of Hawick that government troops made their way south from Edinburgh to deal with them. The Earl of Mar’s men surrounded the town. A proclamation was cried from the mercat cross pointing out to the inhabitants that it was a capital crime to harbour broken men, and in a short time more than 50 were rounded up. Mar did not delay and while six of the more important prisoners were sent for trial in Edinburgh, 18 were bound hand and foot and dragged down to the banks of the Teviot. There, wriggling and kicking, they were held under the water until drowned. Cheap and quick, and a dire warning.

James VI and I learned the power of disnaming in the Borders. In 1604 he applied it to the Highland clans and in order to cure the MacGregors of their love of cattle stealing, he banned their name entirely. It simply became illegal to be called MacGregor and any man bearing that ancient surname could be hunted and killed. The whole social and military structure of the clan was undermined. Alasdair MacGregor, the chief of the name, and five of his leading men, were hanged at the mercat cross for the crime of refusing to give up their name. Clan Gregor scattered. Some took to outlawry in the mountains, others adopted pseudonyms like Gregory, Grant, even Campbell. It is more than a lexical coincidence that the Gaelic ‘clann’ for clan translates directly as children or bairns – as in ‘Sandy’s Bairns’ or ‘Kinmont’s Bairns’.

The year after the disnaming of Clan Gregor, James VI and I applied the same principles in the Borders. One of the most persistently infamous of the reiving families were the Grahams of Eskdale and the Solway mouth. While the royal courts did not ban the name of Graham, the king’s officers did their utmost to extirpate it. Wholesale deportations to Ireland were backed by hangings and press-gangings into armies to fight in European wars. These draconian measures broke the power of the name, but did not remove it. Grahams found their way back to their native places – if not their old reiving habits.

Those who kept their names in the Borders were rarely known by them. As in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, Borderers used a relatively small stock of surnames. There existed many Scotts, Armstrongs, Robsons and Ridleys at any one time, most of them living in the same small area. The mists of confusion thickened when little imagination was used in the giving of christian names; the same handful recur down the generations and also sideways to cousins and uncles. It seems that scores of Walter Scotts, Gilbert Elliots, Robert Kers, Andrew Forsters and Thomas Carletons lived in the sixteenth century, many of them at the same time.

Mistaken identity is more of a danger for historians than it was for the reivers. Scots and English borderers seemed to know exactly who was who, especially when it came to the collection of blackmail (of which more later) and the fact that these men could recognise each other in the smoke and confusion of the Battle of Pinkie is extraordinary.

They had help. Until the recent past Border farmers were often known by the name of their farm rather than what appeared on their birth certificate. The same thing happened in the sixteenth century. When Walter Scott of Buccleuch rode with Walter Scott of Harden to rescue Kinmont Willie Armstrong from Carlisle Castle in 1596, the shorthand ran that Buccleuch and Harden saved Kinmont’s skin.

Blood ties bound tight in the Borders, and how people chose to address each other often remembered that closeness. Not only to avoid confusion in the mosaic of similar names but also to remind everyone of the precision of relationships, patronymics and occasionally matronymics were used. As with the Highland clans, a father’s name was added to his son’s, and men called ‘Sim’s Jock’, ‘Dick’s Davie’ or ‘Sandie’s Gib’ are all to be found in the records. If any unclarity remained names could run to a third generation with the like of ‘Gibb’s Geordie’s Francis’ or ‘Sandie’s Rinyon’s Archie’. Where a father was not available, mothers stepped in for ‘Kate’s Adam’, ‘Peggie’s Wattie’, and ‘Bessie’s Andrew’.

Further refinement could be added by the application of a nickname. These are very colourful and often eloquent. Like ‘Nebless Clem Crozier’, ‘Halflugs Jock Elliot’ and ‘Fingerless Will Nixon’, some had stories to tell and how Clem lost his nose, Jock part of his ears and Will his fingers would add real pungency to the dry recital of dates and places and people. Other nicknames were mercilessly observational. John Armstrong squinted and was ‘Gleed John’, Will Armstrong had a twitch and was ‘Winking Will’ and Jerry Charlton had a tuft of hair sticking up and was ‘Topping’. A dark nature conferred ‘Ill Will Armstrong’ and ‘Evilwillit Sandie’. Perhaps ‘Unhappy Anthone’ met them both on a particularly bad day.

Sexual preferences were unblushingly caught in the web of nicknames. ‘Dand Oliver the Lover’ was bland enough and Dand obviously enjoyed female company. More direct are ‘Dog Pyntle Elliot’ and ‘Wanton Pyntle Willie Hall’. ‘Pyntle’ is Border Scots for ‘penis’. More surprising is the clear recognition of homosexuality. Gay reivers such as ‘Davy the Lady Armstrong’, ‘Buggerback Elliot’ or ‘Mistress Kerr’ are unexpected even though the image is hard to reconcile. Buggerback and Dog Pyntle were brothers (although scarcely able to compare notes) and Davy the Lady was the younger brother of Sim the Laird Armstrong, one of the most feared heidsmen in the Border hills.

Some nicknames are impossible to parse, their meaning long fled. What prompted ‘Sweet Milk’ or ‘Hen Harrow’ or ‘As It Looks’ to be applied is now mysterious – and very intriguing.

What is so attractive about these nicknames is that they sound a faint echo of how the reivers spoke and dealt with each other. They suggest a boisterous, grimly humorous society where men called a spade a shovel and enjoyed a good laugh at others’ quirks and preferences.

Boisterousness often shaded into something darker. And a rare documented example of a Border Reiver talking is dark indeed, the testament of a cruel, ruthless but ultimately honest man. The surname of Burn (sometimes rendered Bourne) held land to the south of the Teviot, in the old Jedforest which grew on part of the Scottish slopes of the Cheviots. They were a hard-bitten, violent bunch, acknowledging Robert Kerr of Cessford as their leader, and even though he was a government official, the Warden of the Scottish Middle March, they enjoyed his open patronage and protection.

On a September night in 1596 Jock and Geordie Burn were returning from a routine raid across the Cheviot tops. Driving cattle before them, the Scots reivers were very unlucky. Riding through the gloaming they were intercepted by Sir Robert Carey, the Warden of the English East March, who was out on patrol with 20 troopers at his back. Hopelessly outnumbered, Geordie Burn, his uncle and their two henchmen fought ferociously. One escaped, two were killed, and Geordie was overpowered and taken prisoner.

Probably at Harbottle Castle, Carey had Burn quickly tried, convicted and condemned to death. But sentence was delayed while the news of the reiver’s capture was allowed to reach the ears of his patron, Sir Robert Kerr of Cessford. Perhaps there would be an advantageous negotiation, perhaps an attempted reprisal which might deliver more prisoners to Carey. In the event there was silence. No word came over the hill trails and Geordie Burn realised that he had been abandoned and was likely to hang.

Sir Robert Carey’s curiosity was stirred. It is said that the warden disguised himself and with two companions went to Burn’s cell to talk with the condemned man. The swagger had gone, and in his resignation, the reiver reviewed the life he had led. Carey later wrote down what he remembered. It amounts to the only authentic testament left by a Border Reiver:

He voluntarily of himself said that he had lived long enough to do so many villanies as he had done; and told us that he had lain with about 40 men’s wives, some in England, some in Scotland, and that he had killed seven Englishmen with his own hands, cruelly murdering them; that he had spent his whole time in whoring, drinking, stealing, and taking deep revenge for slight offences. He seemed to be very penitent, and much desired a minister for the comfort of his soul.

This is fascinating, a catalogue of thuggery, rape, murder, larceny and excess freely confessed – and regretted. Faced with the hangman’s rope, Burn was anxious to bargain with his maker as he owned up to all his sins and asked for a minister to advise him. The transaction has an old-fashioned ring, the medieval arithmetic of damnation. Perhaps like their patrons, the Kerrs of Ferniehurst, Burn’s family had kept their catholic faith, such as it was, for a generation after the establishment of Reformation Scotland. The enumeration of 40 rapes (it is hard to believe that Burn was referring to extra-marital affairs) and the murder of seven Englishmen sounds like a request for other offences to be taken into consideration. He had been taken by Carey for cattle stealing and having been condemned to die had no need to confess to anything else. It sounds as though the reiver was asking to see a minister to enquire after the tariff operating for the fires of hell. What could he expect for 40 rapes and seven murders? Geordie offers no mitigation except penitence, he just wants to know how bad it will be.

The listing of all these crimes and the tone in which Carey records them also has a routine ring. The Burns were not especially notorious and no more than normally active as reivers. The likelihood is that each Border district had a quota of gangsters doing much the same thing. If that is so, then these were grim times. Observers noted that even in pursuit of their daily duties – working the land, herding beasts – many Borderers went about armed, or with a weapon of some sort close at hand. No wonder.

THE PENRITH PLAGUE

In 1598 God’s Punishment tore through Cumberland and Westmorland. An inscription on the wall of the parish church at Penrith records an astonishing figure. Apparently 2,260 perished in an outbreak of the plague. Around 640 died in the town, half the population, and a further 1,800 from the farms and villages of the Eden Valley. At almost exactly the same time in Carlisle 1,196 died in unspeakable agony from the same disease. It is a forgotten epidemic. In their ‘Return of the Black Death’, Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan show that no such thing happened. The epidemic was not a return of the Black Death. What ripped through these horrified communities was in fact a lethal virus not unlike ebola, and it was transmitted not by infected fleas living in the fur of rats but directly from person to person. All they had to do was breath. For this reason the disease spread like lightning, and with their housing huddled close and overcrowded, towns were perfect vectors. Entering Britain through the port of Newcastle, this version of ebola travelled west across Stainmore to Penrith and then made its deadly way north to Carlisle before crossing the border to reach Dumfries. It was an appalling illness, its victims vomiting blood and tissue, haemorrhaging internally and burning with fever. Mercifully many died quickly and their bodies were flung in plague-pits without any ceremony. They also died alone because it became too risky for a minister to give them the last rites and families fled for fear of becoming infected. Curiously this phenomenal outbreak is noted by few historians or many contemporary commentators – even though it presented a much greater threat than any Border Reiver.

Just as Geordie Burn’s confession offers a momentary glimpse of a life of reiving, so the following tells how the law-abiding majority saw these thugs. The Bishop of Carlisle wrote to Cardinal Wolsey in London in the 1520s. He was even-handed:

there is more theft, more extortion by English thieves than there is by all the Scots of Scotland ... for in Hexham . . . every market day there is four score or a hundred strong thieves; and the poor men and gentlemen also see those who did rob them and their goods, and dare neither complain of them by name, nor say one word to them. They take all their cattle and horse, their corn as they carry it to sow, or to the mill to grind, and at their houses bid them deliver what they have or they shall be fired and burnt.

Defiant, confident in the numbers and fearsome reputation, the outlaws regularly rode into town – all over the Borders. Like Tombstone, Dodge City and other notorious locations in the Wild West, the law-abiding folks of Hexham, Carlisle, Hawick and Berwick had much to abide. Those gangsters who lifted their cattle during the week could glare shamelessly on market days at the farmers they had impoverished – and in turn the farmers were compelled to scuttle about their business, heads down, avoiding eye contact, mouths shut. On the wild frontier the rule of law had fled.

THE TIME OF OUR LIVES

In the sixteenth century few knew what time it was, at least in the sense that we mean it now. No one owned timepieces and the only institution which cared enough about the time of day to mark it was the church. In order to summon monks to say the offices of the day – vespers, compline and so on – bells tolled the canonical hours and the day began to divide into more than simply dark and light. To Americans the term ‘fortnight’ is meaningless. It is a relict of the way in which ordinary people used to count the days – or rather the nights. Fortnight is short for fourteen nights and the obsolete ‘sennight’ for a week was in common use in the sixteenth century. Except for Sunday most normal weekdays merged into each other. People did not work hours, they did tasks which finished when they finished. Turning points of the seasons were prominent – like Michaelmas, Lammas, Whitsun and so on, as were saints’ days. The names of these days often survive in the calendar but the meaning has been lost. Christianity used to have many dietary laws (fish on Friday and abstinence in Lent are the only popular survivals) and periods of restriction were usually preceded by a ‘carnival’. It literally means ‘farewell to meat’ and Shrove Tuesday was when Christians ought to have been shriven –or confessed their sins to a priest. Few Border Reivers will have bothered.

Jedburgh may have been an exception, at least for part of the sixteenth century. The town government was thrawn, assertive, independent and willing to fight for its rights, sometimes against unwise odds. In the early 1570s Scotland was riven with dissension between catholics and protestants, between the influence of France and England, and the focus of the former was Mary, Queen of Scots and of the latter, Elizabeth I of England. These alignments were further complicated by the increasingly complex position of Mary’s son and heir, James, and his claims to the throne of England.

Jedburgh stood firm and sure for the protestant cause while the loyalties of Border heidsmen were split. Scott of Buccleuch and Kerr of Ferniehurst were catholic supporters of Mary and Kerr of Cessford had fallen in with Elizabeth and protestantism. When Queen Mary’s party sent a royal herald to read out a proclamation at the old mercat cross at Jedburgh, matters quickly became explosive – and somewhat theatrical, even farcical.

When the herald had dismounted to climb up the steps to the base of the cross, the provost, his bailies and no doubt a substantial crowd had gathered around. Proclamations were of prime importance and the means by which government directives were popularly transmitted. But when the herald unrolled his parchment and read in a loud voice that all men should obey Queen Mary only and ignore all others, the provost stepped forward to call a halt. The herald was taken hold of and forced to eat his parchment. Piece by indigestible piece, it was stuffed into his mouth. That was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse for the poor man.

A hurdle was found and the Queen’s herald was ‘caused to loose down his points’. In modern parlance, his trousers were pulled down around his ankles. The Jedburgh men then forced him to bend over the hurdle and with a horse’s bridle, they spanked his bare backside.

It was an appalling humiliation for a royal officer and when the man sat carefully on his horse to take the road back to Edinburgh, no one doubted that retribution would quickly come the other way. Scott of Buccleuch and Kerr of Ferniehurst (whose tower lies only a little over a mile south of Jedburgh) mustered more than 3,000 riders and descended on the town. But the provost and the townspeople were ready, having laid in six days of provisions and sent urgent messages for aid from Robert Kerr of Cessford. Immediately he rode to the rescue and reinforcements of musketeers and cavalry hurried south. Buccleuch and Kerr of Ferniehurst were compelled to abandon the siege but the latter continued to burn with indignation and he pursued the feud against Jedburgh energetically. The Kerrs tormented the town with ‘riots and murders’, and the close proximity of Ferniehurst hung like a constant black cloud.

KERRY MITTS