The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
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in the struggle for survival the Border was learning new rules. Before the war, raiding and foraying across the frontier has been less than a local industry; invasions and attacks there had certainly been, in time of war, but for more than a century before Edward I began to practise his Scottish policy, the Border had been at peace with itself. The years of Bruce and Wallace and the two Edwards changed all that; a new order was instituted, not by any positive attempt of policy, but by a gradual and inevitable development. People who have suffered every hardship and atrocity, and who have every reason to fear that they will suffer them again, may submit tamely, or they may fight for survival. The English and Scots of the frontier were not tame folk.
When the War of Independence began the Borders had been moving forward towards civilisation; when they ended the people of the Marches had returned to something like the cave ages. Centuries of progress had been destroyed in a generation, and the natives, to quote Scott, had been carried back in every art except those which concerned the destruction of each other.
Partly this arose from the type of war prescribed, says Fordun, by Bruce for the defeat of the invading English.
On foot should be all Scottish war
By hill and moss themselves to wear; Let wood for walls be bow and spear. In strait places gar keep all store, And burn the plain land them before; Then shall they pass away in haste, When that they find naething but waste. With wiles and wakening on the night, And meikle noises made on height.
Che Guevara would have approved every word of it. The Scots, unable except on a few notable occasions to match the might of England in pitched battle, fought a campaign to which their people and country were particularly suited. They scorched the earth, destroyed their own homes and fields, took to the hills and the wilderness with their beasts and all they could move, and carried on the struggle by on-fall, ambush, cutting supply lines, and constant harrying. It was a wasting, cruel war, and they carried it into England whenever they could, so that both sides of the Border suffered alike.
What resulted was not only guerrilla warfare, but guerrilla living. In times of war the ordinary Borderers, both English and Scottish, became almost nomadic; they learned to live on the move, to cut crop subsistence to a minimum and rely on the meat they could drive in front of them. They could build a house in a few hours and have no qualms about abandoning it; they could travel great distances at speed and rely on their skill and cunning to restock supplies by raiding. All these things they were forced to do while English and Scottish armies marched and burned and plundered what was left of their countryside. This was how they were to live whenever war broke out for the next two and a half centuries.
Unfortunately, to the ordinary people, war and peace were not very different. The trouble with all Anglo-Scottish wars was that no one ever won them; they were always liable to break out again. There was no future for the Borderer in trying to lead a settled existence, even in so-called peace-time. Why till crops when they might be burned before harvest? Why build a house well, when it might be a ruin next week? Why teach children the trades of peace when the society they grew up in depended for its existence on spoiling and raiding?
And of course there was national hatred, ever growing. The other country was always the author of all ills, and it was natural to take revenge.
So they had to live as best they could, and in the two centuries following the War of Independence the Border developed its system of existence, which was seen in full flower in the sixteenth century, between Flodden and the accession of a Scottish king to the throne of England. It was a system of armed plunder, from neighbours as well as from subjects of the opposite realm. The astonishing thing about it was that, while both governments officially deplored what must be called the reiver economy, they exploited it quite cynically for their own ends. The Borders were an ever-ready source of fighting men, a permanent mobile task force to be used when war broke out. If by some strange process of mass hypnosis, all the Elliots and Armstrongs and the like on one side, and all the Forsters and Musgraves on the other, had suddenly been induced to burn their weapons and become peaceful peasants, there would have been consternation in London and Edinburgh. The Border, in a sense, was a bloody buffer state which absorbed the principal horrors of war. With the benefit of hindsight, one could almost say that the social chaos of the frontier was a political necessity.
In fairness to the two central authorities, they did try to pacify as far as they could, and this not being very far, they too adapted to the special conditions. Rules were drawn up for governing, if that is the word, the turbulent Anglo-Scottish Border society. The Wardens, again both English and Scottish, who were to be the nominal overseers of the community, made their appearance at the time of the War of Independence, and their roles as defenders of their respective national frontiers and co-operating governors of the Marches, developed from there. But the laws that were made specially for the Borders were self-defeating; they were in themselves a recognition of abnormality, and at worst they even encouraged it.
So the reiving system developed. From the Bannockburn era onwards the tenor of Border life was geared to it, and no medieval political development was strong enough to alter it. In a medieval context, what happened on the Border does not stand out especially, because it blended into those violent times. But with the advance of civilisation, the gradual alteration of human values, the tendency—admittedly not all that noticeable sometimes—to prefer diplomacy to violence, the anachronism of Border life was seen in greater relief. In the sixteenth century, when England at least was beginning to look far beyond her own coasts, when the spirit of Western man was being reborn, when internal peace was a not uncommon occurrence, the men of the Border were still going their old ways, lifting and looting, settling their disputes largely by force, clinging to their old customs and their own peculiar ethical code. Theirs was a frontier on which only the fittest had survived; what emerged in the 1500s was a very hardy growth.
1. Hume Brown.
2. Ridpath, p. 173. 3. Ibid.
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