by Graham Robb
Perhaps noticing something in my expression, he added, in order to excuse himself or to invite me to join him in the historical joke, ‘Onyways, it was prob’ly Armstrongs from ower there, come to steal the sheep!’
By the time I reached home an hour later, I knew that something would have to be written about this neglected region where nature and humans conspired to destroy the evidence of the past. In the weeks that followed, I discovered the great treasure of border history in the archives of the Scottish and English border officers, and those empty landscapes began to be populated with identifiable individuals.
Only the stone footings of their towers remained, the people themselves had been illiterate and many of their ballads had probably been written by Walter Scott or professional balladeers, but the thousands of documents preserved in the State Papers of Scotland, England and France were a stupendously detailed record of that dark age of British history. There were minute accounts of reiving expeditions and official raids conducted by the wardens; there were verbal ‘maps’ describing the location of every hidden settlement and reiver’s lair; there were the reports of spies and diplomats, the letters of kings and queens, cries for help from the beleaguered frontier and disquisitions on the ancient laws and customs of the Borders.
Historians had plundered those records for examples of the chaos and the moral vacuum which seemed to be caused by the lack of central government, but in that medieval Babel of squabbling, frightened, laughing and sinister voices, a world came to life with its own battles, feuds and dynasties, its peculiar patterns of settlement and internal migration, its history and legends, and even its own laws. And at the heart of that world was something stranger than even the best-informed wardens had suspected: a land incalculably older than Scotland or England, known only to the people who buried the dead on their doorsteps and who recognized no lords or nation but their own.
10
‘Loveable Custumis’
It is one of the joys of studying history that first impressions are always wrong. Truth is proverbially stranger than fiction, but only because no guiding mind has contrived to make it credible. The truth is that the lawless borderlands of the Middle Ages had a fully developed, indigenous legal system. A civil and criminal code administered by reivers sounds like an ironic euphemism, yet it was described in almost identical terms in documents spanning several centuries and adopted, with few modifications, by the governments of England and Scotland.
The laws and customs of the borderers were first written down in 1249, after the perambulation of the forty-eight Scottish and English knights. The Leges Marchiarum (March law or Border law) were distinct from the laws of Scotland and England and had remained in use throughout the Borders for many generations:
The lawis of marchis . . . are antient and loveable custumis, ressavit [accepted] and standing in force as law, be lang use, and mutual consent of the Wardans and subjectis of baith the realmis, as fund be [found by] experience to be gude and proffitabill for the quietnes of the bordouris, and gude nichtbourheid amangis the pepill, inhabitantis of baith the natiounis.
The fact that these ‘loveable’ (commendable) customs were the same on both sides of the border suggests a very early origin: March law might have been the last and still lively remnant of the remote period when the post-Roman kingdoms of Strathclyde and Northumbria had straddled the future frontier.
One of the few consistently sensible policies of both governments was to codify and, in principle, uphold those laws and customs from a Britain which no longer existed. Instead of imposing ‘foreign’ legislation passed in Edinburgh or Westminster, they recognized the usefulness of rules which were ‘commoun and indifferent to the subjectis of baith the realmis’ and which, far from being an imposition, reinforced the community which adhered to them. Some of the worst disasters in the administration of the frontier were caused by a failure to apply or to comprehend the efficacy of March law.
It provided a system of justice and compensation involving complex financial calculations and the use of hostages or ‘pledges’, which prevented criminal acts from igniting feuds and reprisals. It set procedures for the recovery of stolen goods and, in effect, established a domestic police force. It regulated the traditional days of truce on which conflicts were resolved, and it ensured compliance with the courts’ decisions. Despite its antiquity, it was flexible enough to cope with the imposition of a national frontier: no man could be found guilty unless the allegations were supported by at least one of his compatriots.
It was obvious that an individual warden, who might be lazy, corrupt or cowardly, could never bring lasting order to a region controlled by rebellious clans, but I was surprised to find such institutional orderliness behind the mayhem. The home-grown system of laws was so effective that a legal historian has recently proposed it as a model for policy makers hoping to bring stability to zones of long-standing conflict. This ‘unique and decentralized system of cross-border criminal law’ proves that, ‘contrary to conventional wisdom’, even when the two sides are ‘bitter enemies’, ‘central authority is not needed to create or enforce a legal system governing intergroup interactions’.
Since the reivers of the Anglo-Scottish border had burned and plundered far and wide, the question itself seemed questionable: were the reivers restrained and anarchy held at bay by the power of the two nations, or was it thanks to those ‘ancient and loveable customs’ that the Marches had been able to function as a buffer zone? Those respected traditions might explain why some hardy individuals had been able to live in this blighted zone, but was it really possible that the borderers’ boisterous society had helped the two nations to coexist and in this way laid the foundations of a united kingdom? It was only when the reivers themselves emerged from the records that this fantastic vision began to look like the historical truth.
*
Some of the reivers whose outlandish names appear in the official papers of England and Scotland have become quite famous: Archie Fire-the-Braes, Buggerback, Davy the Lady, Jok Pott the Bastard, Wynkyng Will and a hundred other colourfully named members of the merry band. These Cumbrian cowboys were the hell-raising night-riders who terrorized the frontier and cocked a snook at the authorities for a century or more. Plucked from their particular time and place, and labelled ‘the much-feared’ or ‘the scourge of the borders’, they look like miniatures in a museum battle scene. These spine-chilling felons are the stars of reiver tourism. Who could fail to tremble at the thought of ‘Nebless Clem’ or ‘Fingerless Will’ or even (if they knew what it meant) ‘Dog Pyntle Elliot’?9 These, it is supposed, were the medieval Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams and Nixons whose modern equivalents make honest people’s lives a misery and who appear in the News and Star and the Cumberland News, branded with the bons mots of magistrates and judges: ‘a danger to society’, ‘a one-man crime-wave’, etc.
The friends and relations of Archie, Clem, Jok and Will would have been amazed and perhaps delighted. The startling fact is that, unlike their twenty-first-century descendants who break into garden sheds, steal farm gates, rustle sheep and elicit groans of recognition from court officials, most of these reivers took part in only one raid. The majority of individuals named in the records never went reiving at all. The records are certainly comprehensive, since no one was likely to miss the ransacking of several farms or a small town. Yet ‘the Bastarde of Glenvoren’, ‘Ill-Drowned Geordie’, ‘Ill-Wild Will’10 and dozens of other notorious reivers are mentioned only once. These names were not titles bestowed by an awestruck society, they were simply ‘to-names’, to distinguish, for example, ‘Gleyed John’ and ‘Jock Halflugs’ from all the other John Nixons and Jock Elliots who did not have a squint or mutilated ears.
For most of these men, the reiving expedition was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and, as in other cattle-raiding societies, a rite of passage. For every ballad commemorating a famous raid, there must have been a thousand well-worn tales of the glorious, hectic day when grandfather ear
ned the right to be called a man by burning down a Tynedale barn or making off with a Cheviot farmer’s sheep. The distant voice of the reivers can be heard not only in the polished ballads but also on the terraces of Brunton Park, home of Carlisle United football club, where the insults still travel in the same direction, from North Cumbria, ‘the land that’s mountainous and green’ (as the chant has it) towards Newcastle and the north-east, the home of ‘Geordie scum’.
An entire season’s reiving by men of the West Marches in 1589–90 is recorded in a list of ‘bills’ or official complaints compiled for the English and Scottish wardens. The biggest raid was carried out by two hundred and four riders, mostly Armstrongs and Elliots. A typical raiding party was much smaller. The document lists a total of fifty-three raids, involving more than a thousand reivers, and in all those perilous, high-speed excursions over moonlit moorland, only three men were killed and two ‘maimed’. Another document lists unresolved complaints relating to offences committed by men of Liddesdale between 1579 and 1587. As ‘unredressed’ offences, these may well have had an element of malice. A total of one hundred and twenty-three houses were burned by more than two thousand reivers in seven raids. Eleven men were killed, but all eleven perished in two raids led by the exceptionally violent and remorseless Kinmont Willie, whom we shall meet again.
By comparison with medieval sporting events, reiving of the traditional kind was a remarkably safe activity – even by comparison with the lively local tradition of jumping off the single-arch bridge on the border at Penton into the shallow pools of the rock-strewn Liddel, which several inhabitants of Carlisle have described to me with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement at their youthful stupidity. The object of a reiving expedition was not to kill another man but to take his animals and whatever else came to hand, preferably with stealth and cunning. Sometimes, the owner himself was stolen so that he could be held to ransom.
Some of those expeditions were like major house removals, and perhaps reiving expertise is the origin of the haulage and removal businesses which are still a mainstay of the Cumbrian economy. One of the largest raids in the winter of 1589–90 was directed against a wealthy servant’s house on the estate of Sir John Forster in Hethpool, two miles inside England in the northern Cheviots. On the night of 3 November, thirty riders arrived from the west and set about preparing eighteen animals and almost a hundred household items for a thirty-mile overnight journey: ‘a steil cap’, a sword, a dagger, some knives and spears; breeches, doublets, shirts, a cloak and a jerkin; a complete woman’s wardrobe, including nightgowns and ribbons; some sheets and coverlets, a cauldron, a pan, a bolt of hemp, a pair of cards (for carding wool), four ‘childrens coates’, six shillings, a shroud and, impressively, ‘a fetherbed’.
Their ponies laden with kitchenware and underwear and, somehow, the feather bed (probably a mattress rather than a frame), the cackling band turned for home with a wonderful tale to tell. This was a time-honoured and, in some ways, orderly enterprise. While the reivers celebrated the haul and their wives and sisters tried on the garments, the ‘bereived’ made a careful note, as though for an insurance company, of every stolen item and its monetary value. The list was then submitted to the wardens, who would present it at the next day of truce.
Most cases were satisfactorily resolved, but some were not, and here, when all the records are indiscriminately lumped together under the same heading, is the source of the great and lasting confusion. On the one hand, there were the once-in-a-lifetime reivers who usually returned the stolen goods or paid remuneration. Then there were the murderous reiver armies of a few petty warlords such as Kinmont Willie, hardened by military experience in the service of one nation or the other. These were men who cynically exploited a tradition, in the same way that knife-wielding hooligans masquerade as football supporters.
Others were engaged in long-running family feuds which were invariably bloody but constrained by the sharp focus of their hatred. These in turn could become confused with the wardens’ punitive raids, some of which were inspired by greed or revenge. And finally, in the years of famine at the end of the sixteenth century when order broke down as far south as Penrith, there were wandering gangs of desperadoes and professional thieves whose names were known to no one and who came from much farther afield. An especially gruesome example, which has often been quoted as a representative episode of reiver history, took place at Caldbeck, ten miles south of Carlisle, in the winter of 1592–3. Six thieves broke into the house of a man called Sowerby.
They sett him on his bare buttockes upon an hote iron, and there they burned him and rubbed him with an hote gridle about his bellie and sondry other partes of his body to make him give up his money, which they took, under £4.
This brutal burglary was described in the report as ‘a speciall outrage’, in other words, as an exceptional event occurring outside the usual run of reiving and well beyond the zone controlled by the reiving clans. In the borderlands north and east of Carlisle, a band of sadistic thieves would have found it impossible to operate with impunity.
These records which seem to paint a picture of unremitting violence are full of unexpected vistas like the side-valleys of the Liddesdale hills. Perhaps the most surprising is the fact that, apart from organized reiving, practically no crimes were reported. In 1599, the English warden of the East March, Robert Carey, correcting Queen Elizabeth’s assumption that reiving occurred ‘in the dead of winter’, explained that reivers were active only from Michaelmas to Martinmas (29 September to 11 November), when the fells were ‘good and dry’ and the cattle strong enough to be driven. Outside the reiving season, he wrote, there was ‘great quiet and little or no stealing’.
Some crimes were almost unknown. In his first year as warden of the Middle March, Robert Carey arrested and hanged two ‘gentlemen theeves’ who ‘robbed and took purses from travellers on the highways’. The incident, which he recalled in his Memoirs, would have been scarcely worth mentioning elsewhere in England, but highway robbery was ‘a theft that was never heard of in those parts before’. A medieval borderland crossed by major north–south routes but devoid of highwaymen is a curious image and the absence of ordinary felonies on the wild frontier is almost as intriguing as the clue to a crime.
*
On the day we cycled back to England from the Queen’s Mire, past the hamlet of Hermitage where Walter Scott met his first Liddesdale sheep farmer, and the solitary cottages with their warning ‘Farm Watch’ signs, I wondered whether criminal behaviour inevitably occurs near borders, where one jurisdiction meets another. Kegs of contraband liquor found their way from inlets on the Solway Firth into the depths of Liddesdale, where the young lawyer from Edinburgh often breakfasted on ‘run brandy’.
Even in a united kingdom, a border between constabularies or a minor difference in the law can give a small advantage to a thief escaping with a piece of farming equipment or a sheep. In the summer of 2015, on the road from Longtown to the border, I noticed a tall, neatly dressed man kneeling in the verge. He had roped off a small area as though it was a crime scene. Inside the cordon was a square block of carved sandstone bearing a round, wrought-iron plaque marked ‘Carlisle – 12 miles’. It might have been a picture in a book of obscure occupations: ‘The Milestone Mender’, with his paintbrush, scrubber, bag of gravel, some weed matting and a hammer.
I remarked on the almost complete sequence of milestones on the old turnpike road and said that, where I used to live, they would all have been stolen long ago. ‘Ah!’, he said, ‘but they do get stolen.’ This is why he was setting the plaque deeper in the stone and reinforcing the metal bolts which hold it in place. He explained that while English scrap-metal merchants now had to obtain written proof of each item’s provenance, the trade was still unregulated in Scotland. Only recently, on the road to Brampton, one of those historical treasures had been prised off with a crowbar and spirited across the border to a Scottish merchant a few miles away who would ask no questions.
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bsp; Twenty-first-century Liddesdale is hardly a den of thieves. In the absence of any visible police presence, a certain amount of local policing helps to maintain order. A local farmer whose animals had a tendency to wander onto a neighbour’s property opened his front door one day to discover an errant sheep attached to the door-knob with a rope. In another, legally more complex incident, an estate owner erected a small fishing hut on land over which he owned the fishing rights. A group of anglers from another part of the country, traipsing over a field and idling away the time on a riverbank, is not usually a welcome sight to a working farmer. The hut mysteriously caught fire, its fireproof replacement fell into the river and, as though the matter had been settled once and for all in a court of law, no further attempt was made to provide shelter for the anglers. This might sound criminal to a city-dweller, but it has a powerful echo of the old law according to which no man shall ‘set stob and staik’ (erect a permanent structure) in the Debatable Land (here).
On that day, we reached Newcastleton from the north, where the mile-long street stretches away in a straight line towards England. Stopping at Elliots the butchers, we picked up a copy of the latest Copshaw Clatter.11 This useful publication contains a regular police report. Sometimes, in exceptional circumstances – for example, after the sighting of a ‘suspicious vehicle’ – local people are advised to lock their doors when they leave the house. The following, untypically dramatic list of incidents is taken from the September 2015 issue:
8th June – Sudden death in the village.
19th June – Theft of fencing from field at bottom of village.
22nd June – Vehicle blocking road at Signal Box Cottage: lorry became stuck while attempting to turn.
24th June – Alarm activation at Health Centre. Accidental.
1st July – Alarm activation at Costcutter. All in order.
