The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
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of the Anglo-Scottish frontier is to remark that, in spite of everything, they are still there.
For if there are qualities in the Border people which are less than amiable, it must be understood that they were shaped by the kind of continuous ordeal that has passed most of Britain by. That ordeal reached its peak in the sixteenth century, when great numbers of the people inhabiting the frontier territory (the old Border Marches) lived by despoiling each other, when the great Border tribes, both English and Scottish, feuded continuously among themselves, when robbery and blackmail were everyday professions, when raiding, arson, kidnapping, murder and extortion were an important part of the social system.
This had very little to do with war between the two countries, who spent most of the century at peace with each other. It was a way of life pursued in peace-time, by people who accepted it as normal. It meant that no man who lived between the Scottish Southern Uplands and the Pennines could walk abroad unarmed in safety; no householder in all the Marches could go to sleep secure; no beast or cattle could be left unguarded. The seamen of the first Elizabeth might sweep the world’s greatest fleet off the seas, but for all the protection she could give to her Northumbrian peasants they might as well have been in Africa. While young Shakespeare wrote his plays, and the monarchs of England and Scotland ruled the comparatively secure hearts of their kingdoms, the narrow hill land between was dominated by the lance and the sword. The tribal leaders from their towers, the broken men and outlaws of the mosses, the ordinary peasants of the valleys, in their own phrase, “shook loose the Border”. They continued to shake it as long as it was a political reality, practising systematic robbery and destruction on each other. History has christened them the Border reivers.2
How this violent and incongruous social condition arose in the comparatively recent history of the British Isles is a strange, frequently misunderstood story.
The English-Scottish frontier is and was the dividing line between two of the most energetic, aggressive, talented and altogether formidable nations in human history. Any number of factors, including geography, race movement, and the Romans decided where the line should be, and once it was there, on the map, on the countryside, and in men’s minds, the stage was set. Possibly English on one side and Scots on the other could have lived peaceably as national neighbours—indeed, for long periods they did; but it was not in the nature of either of the beasts to stay quiet for long. No doubt they ought to have done; successive English kings thought so, and did their utmost, by fair means and foul, to bring about the amity and unity which eventually prevailed. At least, unity prevailed; amity is a more questionable commodity, especially north of the Border, even today.
But in the making of Britain, between England and Scotland, there was prolonged and terrible violence, and whoever gained in the end, the Border country suffered fearfully in the process. It was the ring in which the champions met; armies marched and counter-marched and fought and fled across it; it was wasted and burned and despoiled, its people harried and robbed and slaughtered, on both sides, by both sides. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the Borderers were the people who bore the brunt; for almost 300 years, from the late thirteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, they lived on a battlefield that stretched from the Solway to the North Sea. War after war was fought on it, and this, to put it mildly, had an effect on the folk who lived there.
What this effect was will be examined more closely later; for the moment it is enough to say that constant strife, or the threat of it, bred up a race of hard people along the Border line. They lived in a jungle, and they had to live by jungle rules. This is not to excuse them, if that were necessary, but to explain. If a man cannot live, and ensure that his family lives, within the law, he has no alternative but to step outside it.3 It was inevitable that the way of life which the Borderer had to follow in time of war should be carried over into what was nominally peace-time; habits are hard to break, and here they became so deeply ingrained as to be almost instinctive.
By the sixteenth century robbery and blood feud had become virtually systematic, and that century saw the activities of the steel-bonneted Border riders—noble and simple, robber and lawman, soldier and farmer, outlaw and peasant—at their height.
In the story of Britain, the Border reiver is a unique figure. He was not part of a separate minority group in his area; he came from every social class. Some reivers lived in outlaw bands, but most of them were ordinary members of the community, and they were everywhere in the Marches. The reiver was a rustic, but in some ways a remarkably sophisticated one. In a modern charge sheet he would probably be described as an agricultural labourer, or a small-holder, or gentleman farmer, or even a peer of the realm; he was also a professional cattle-rustler. In addition he was a fighting man who, on the evidence, handled his weapons with superb skill; a guerrilla soldier of great resource to whom the arts of theft, raid, tracking and ambush were second nature.
But he was also often a gangster organised on highly professional lines, who had perfected the protection racket three centuries before Chicago was built. He gave the word “blackmail” to the English language. For many generations he and his people formed almost a lawless state within, or between, two countries, and in spite of all that was done for their suppression, and the complicated international arrangements that were made for their regulation, they flourished until England and Scotland came under one king.
Of course they were checked and stayed, fined and hanged, pursued and evicted, when authority had the time and the strength to exert itself, but this was no more than a staunching process; the hoof-beats had not died away before they were drumming again. From the late Middle Ages until the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Marches of England and Scotland were a perpetual badman’s territory, dominated by raiders and free-booters, plunderers and rustlers, Border lords and outlaw riders.
Because it was so localised, and is now so long ago, and because the Border ballads and legends have cast a gloss of romance over it, there is a tendency to regard the high midnight of the Border reiver as a stirring, gallant episode in British history. It was not like that; it was as cruel and horrible in its way as Biafra or Vietnam. And the most unusual feature of it was that this was not, at its zenith in the sixteenth century, a case of an innocent, defenceless community in the grip of a war, or of a small criminal element’s reign of terror—the Border folk made the war and terror on themselves; it was as much a part of their lives as agriculture. It follows that they were unusual folk, and that the stamp of the old days is on them still. If the Borderer is closer and tougher and dourer than his fellow-countrymen, it is because he is the descendant of men and women who lived by and in the shadow of raid and theft and bloody murder.
How the frontier society was born and grew, how Border raiding became a systematic thing, how the two governments tried to deal with it, how it fitted into the politics and diplomacy of the two realms and into the social life of the area, and how, almost suddenly, it passed away, is the theme of this book. Some of the stories have been told before, not always accurately; immense scholarship has been applied to various aspects of the subject, and I don’t wish simply to re-tell old tales, or to presume to improve on the researches of eminent historians. But it has seemed to me, knowing something of the Border and its literature, romantic and factual, that the reivers themselves have never been given a history, and that there are still points to be made, and stories to be told, perhaps in a rather different way.
There is a school of Border writers who may be called the romantics. The first of these is the greatest man the region ever produced, Sir Walter Scott. It is not too much to say that Scott made the legendary Border as most people vaguely understand it; a land of brave men and daring deeds, of gothic mystery and fairytale beauty, of gallant Scot and sturdy Saxon, of high ideals and sweet dreams clothed in ballads that are the very heart of a nation’s poetry. All perfectly true, in its way, but not the whole story. Scott knew the other side as well, the blood and the terror and the cruelty and the crime. He, after all, understood the Borderland as probably no one else has ever done, and no other writer or scholar has done anything like as much to rescue its real history from the past. But he was a professional romantic; it was not his job to view his subject as it snarled at him over the business end of a Liddesdale lance; there were no