The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
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each having a little sodden meat. When the table was served, the servants sat down with us; but the upper mess instead of porridge, had a pullet with some prunes in the broth. The Scots, living then in factions, used to keep many followers and so consumed their revenues in victuals, and were always in want of money.”
However, he found them hospitable to strangers, the city folk entertaining “passengers on acquaintance”.
The agricultural system of the Borderers, peaceful and lawless alike, followed a regular pattern. From autumn to spring, when the nights were long, was the season for raiding; the summer months were for husbandry, and although raiding occurred then also, it was less systematic. Tillage took place in spring and summer, and the crops were mainly oats, rye, and barley, but the main effort went into cattle and sheep raising. For this the rural Borderer had to be mobile, leaving his winter dwelling about April to move into the “hielands” where he lived in his sheiling for the next four or five months while the cattle pastured.
Although the sheiling communities were safer than the winter quarters, they were not immune from the reivers. Their inaccessibility cut both ways, for if it made raiding more difficult it also placed the herdsmen farther from the protection of the Warden forces. Eure wrote to Burghley at the start of the 1597 summering to complain that he could not defend the Middle March sheilings “without I have 100 foot from Berwick to lie during the summer with them for defence.” In that season at least the Scots were hitting the sheilings harder than usual, so that Eure found his people were reluctant to venture out summering, “which is their chiefest profitt”.
Following this system of transhumance was easier for people who were not accustomed to build houses for permanence, and who had learned from generations of warfare and raiding to live on the hoof. Even their winter quarters were often makeshift affairs that could be put up in a matter of hours. They were fashioned of clay, or of stones when they were available, and sometimes of turf sods, with roofs of thatch or turf. Most of the isolated holdings would be of this type, “huts and cottages” as Leslie says, “about the burning of which they are nowise concerned”. It was easy enough to build another, and Sir Robert Bowes described in 1546 how “if such cottages or cabins where they dwell in be bront of one day they will the next day maik other and not remove from the ground”.
In the larger villages there was more effort at permanence, with sturdy stone houses and walls, and in Tynedale and on the Scottish side there were some “very stronge houses” constructed of massive baulks of oak bound hard together and “so thycke mortressed that yt wilbe very harde, without greatt force and lasoure, to break or caste [them] downe”. By lining the walls and roofs thickly with turf the builders went some way towards fire-proofing these block-houses; Ill Will Armstrong’s house in the Scottish West March was “buylded after siche a maner that it couth not be brynt ne distroyed, unto it was cut downe with axes”.
The next stage up from the wooden block-house was the peel tower, many of which can still be seen all over the Border. An excellent example is Smailholm, near Kelso, or Hollows Tower on the Esk, which are rather de luxe models, but show exactly the purpose which the peel tower served.
The peel was built of stone, with walls of massive thickness, and ideally was three or four storeys high. The only entrance was through a double door at ground level, one of the doors being an outer iron grating, and the other of oak reinforced with iron. The bottom storey was used as a store room, and the floors above were reached by a narrow curving stair, called a turnpike, usually going up clockwise so that a defender retreating up the flight had his unguarded left side to the wall, and his sword arm to the outside; his attacker, coming up, was at the disadvantage of having his sword arm to the wall. Tradition has it that the Kerrs, who were notoriously left-handed,4 built their stairs anti-clockwise.
The upper floors were the living quarters, and at the very top there would usually be a beacon, to summon help in attack or give warning of an impending foray.
The peel was normally a chief’s house, and no matter how rich or powerful a Border leader might become he needed a tower at least for his personal safety and to provide a rallying point and defensive centre for his dependants. Their great virtue was their simplicity and strength; they were impervious to fire from the outside, or indeed to anything short of artillery or a sustained siege. Once inside, with the doors shut, the defenders could hold out against a greatly superior force, firing from the arrow-slits and shot-holes, and hurling down interesting objects from the roof. Even when the doors were forced, determined men could fight from floor to floor.
The situation of the towers varied. Sometimes a dwelling house was attached, and normally the chief’s immediate family and dependants, sometimes in large numbers, would live in and around the fortress. The peel might be surrounded by a large wall, known as a barmekin or barnekin; by statute of 1535 Scottish leaders on the Border were obliged to build them to regulation size, over two feet thick and between seven and eight feet high. The barnekin offered a refuge for people and cattle, and a defensible perimeter against minor attacks.
Even when he had to abandon his peel in the face of a large invasion, and retire to the wastes or mosses with his folk and goods, the Borderer had an ingenious way of preventing its destruction in his absence. The interior of the peel would be stuffed tight with smouldering peat, which would burn for days, and made it impossible for gunpowder charges to be laid, or for the attackers to get inside and set to work with crowbars and axes. When the Borderer found it safe to return he would have to renew and repair his woodwork, but the framework of his tower would be little the worse for wear.
There were methods of capturing a peel tower, one of which is described in detail by a reiver in Chapter XV. The Bold Buccleuch’s5 method, described by young Scrope,6 of “fyre to the door” whereby the defenders were smoked out, was probably common practice, especially when attackers had succeeded in capturing the ground floor and driving the defenders upstairs. Another ingenious method was used by Robert Carey in attacking a Graham peel: “we set presently at worke to get up to the top of the tower and to uncover the roofe, and then some 20 of [the besiegers] to fall down together, and by that means to win the tower”.
Carey was fairly new to the frontier at that time, and since the redoubtable Thomas Carleton, an officer of great experience, was at his elbow throughout the operation, we can guess whose bright idea it was to remove the roof.
The towers and block-houses were no doubt comparatively comfortable places, and decently if crudely furnished, although there was a total absence of such refinements as carpets or decorations, but the peasant huts and sheilings were primitive in the extreme. Heat was by peat fire, probably in the centre of the floor; the clothing, like the furniture, was of the simplest. “The husbandmen in Scotland, the servants, and almost all the country wore coarse cloth made at home of grey or sky colour, and flat blue caps very broad,” says our English traveller.7 The heads of tribes and leading landowners on both sides might use satin, silk, damask, lace, and taffeta, but among the poorer folk leather and buckskin for the men, and broadcloth, linen and woollens for both sexes were the common dress materials.
We get some idea of clothing and household goods among the Borderers from the lists of goods stolen in raids. These vary from the sumptuous apparel lifted from Robert Kerr of Ancrum, including fine hats and dresses, feather beds and plate, to the crude kitchen utensils of the peasants. An inventory of goods stolen from a servant of John Forster’s in 1590 is an interesting guide to the possessions of a “middle class” Borderer. It includes two doublets, two pairs of breeches, a cloak, a jerkin, a woman’s kirtle and pair of sleeves, nine kerchiefs, seven rails (shifts), five pairs of linen sheets, two coverlets, two linen shirts, a purse containing six shillings, another purse, two silk ribbons, a winding cloth, a feather bed, three shirts, a cauldron, and so on. Not a badly furnished establishment; Forster’s servant could obviously afford to spend money on his wife’s appearance—which is mentioned elsewhere as a common Border trait.