The Steel Bonnets

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,1 put it, if Hume stopped the Merse farmers selling to Berwick, “we need no other siege”. It is significant that Carey, writing to Burghley2 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 Hunsdon3 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.4 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 trod5 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.6 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. 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. William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–98), principal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and the leading English statesman of the day.

3. 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. 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. Hot trod—lawful pursuit of reivers.

6. 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

“A martial kind of men”

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;1 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,2 the great English veteran who led the van at Flodden when England inflicted the heaviest defeat in Scottish history, was in no doubt about the Scottish Borderers. To him they were “the boldest men, and the hottest, that ever I saw any nation”. Froissart, writing from an earlier period, but again out of a knowledge that was Border-based, thought both Scots and English “good men of war, for when they meet there is a hard fight without sparing: there is no ‘Ho!’ between them as long as spears, swords, axes, or daggers will endure, but lay on each upon other”. How right he was; of course, he and Surrey were looking at the Borderers as soldiers, but on the frontier the line between civil and military was often ill-defined, even in peace-time.

Camden found the Borderers hard, like their country. “In the wastes … you may see as it were the ancient nomads, a martial kind of men who, from the month of April into August, lie out scattering and summering with their cattle, in little cottages here and there, which they call sheils and sheilings.” He could not survey the Roman Wall as closely as he wished “for the rank robbers thereabout”.

Camden knew the Scots West Marchmen as “infamous for robberies”; his view is balanced by the account of the English Middle March in 1549, from the Chorographia:

“The chief [dales] are Tynedale and Redesdale, a country that William the Conqueror did not subdue, retaining to this day the ancient laws and customs. These Highlanders are famous for thieving; they are all bred up and live by theft. They come down from these dales into the low countries, and carry away horses and cattle so cunningly, that it will be hard for any to get them or their cattle, except they be acquainted with some master thief, who for some money may help them to their stolen goods, or deceive them.”

Probably the fullest contemporary description of sixteenth-century Border life is that given by Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who will be more fully quoted in the chapter on reiving technique. He was a close student of social matters, and for the Scottish side at least, his account is the best obtainable.

The Borderers, he writes, “assume to themselves the greatest habits of licence.… For as, in time of war, they are readily reduced to extreme poverty by the almost daily inroads of the enemy, so, on the restoration of peace, they entirely neglect to cultivate their lands, though fertile, from the fear of the fruits of their labour being immediately destroyed by a new war. Whence it happens that they seek their subsistence by robberies, or rather by plundering and rapine, for they are particularly averse to the shedding of blood; nor do they much concern themselves whether it be from Scots or English that they rob and plunder.”

Leslie has a good deal to say of the characters of the Borderers, and it is not all bad. He is the main authority for the myth that they were reluctant to kill, except in feud; he also maintained “that having once pledged their faith, even to an enemy, they are very strict in observing it, insomuch that they think nothing can be more heinous than violated fidelity.”

In theory, possibly, but this is one of those hallowed Border legends which requires close examination. There was certainly in the sixteenth century a Border code of honour, a kind of hangover from the days of Percy and Douglas, recognised and referred to and in some ways respected. Robert Carey3 wrote to Cecil4 of Scottish gentlemen who “will rather lose their lives and livings, than go back from their word, and break the custom of the Border”. The last phrase is significant. One of Ralph Sadler’s5 English spies said the Scots had no scruples about stealing, “and yet they would not bewray any man that trust in them for all the gold in Scotland and France.” According to Leslie, to be publicly reproached a proven faith-breaker was a greater punishment “even than an honourable death inflicted on the guilty person”.