The Debatable Land

by Graham Robb

  Yet I still half-believed that those silent landscapes might contain an unnoticed lesson, like some Dead Sea Scroll of the borderlands concealed in the enfolding hills, and so it was with a lurking sense of unfinished adventures that I finally made it to the top of Tinnis Hill. Having failed to reach it from the south-west and the south-east, I tried the northern approach from the single-track Langholm–Newcastleton road over Tarras Moss and found it even swampier. What should have been a morning’s walk took on the complexity of an Everest expedition. A woman who lives by one of the burns which rise on the hill told me of an old route to the summit known only to shepherds and hunters. This proved to be a false lead, but it was likely that such a route did exist: the ‘dinas’ or ‘fort’ of the mountain’s name implies habitation of some kind, if only a temporary refuge.

  Base camp turned out to be Whisgills, two miles west of Kershopefoot on the lower slopes of Tinnis Hill. More than two weeks had passed without rain. I left the bicycle near Windy Edge and headed for the shoulder of the mountain. The white, wind-combed grasses were dry and crackly on their bed of liquid peat. I had often seen the light pass over that hillside like a hand stroking soft deer hide. Now, walking into the postcard scene, I stumbled over knee-high tussocks and plotted endless diagonals through the maze of gullies.

  After more than an hour, the rubble of an unidentifiable circular structure emerged from the bentgrass. Some of its stones had been heaped up on three sides of the Ordnance Survey triangulation pillar at the summit. A cloud of flies buzzed around the droppings of animals which had taken shelter there.

  The view from the top was so magnificent that my first thought on reaching it was sadness at having to leave. Beyond the summit to the north lay the expanse of Tarras Moss; the only sign of the road which crosses it was the speck of a white van heading for Langholm. Behind, apart from a short stretch of the Esk valley near Canonbie concealed by fir trees, the entire Debatable Land and much of Cumbria were visible. A solitary column of white smoke was rising from the Solway coast.

  From that vantage point, in 1517, when history at last intruded on the Debatable Land and its days were numbered, the alarming sight would have been impossible to miss. Far to the south, the beacons of the Lake District occasionally broadcast their fiery warnings of invasion, but closer to hand, the smoke curling up from the once-deserted river valleys showed that another, more local system of communication was developing along the Esk and the Liddel. In their towers of oak and clay, thieves and outlaws sat at hearths where no fires had been lit before, waiting for the full moon to light their way across the moors.

  PART THREE

  16

  ‘Stob and Staik’

  The first recorded trouble in the Debatable Land concerned neither sheep nor cattle but the migratory animals which live on the border itself. ‘Have you got the fishing?’ is one of the questions most often asked by local visitors to the house. The idea that fishing rights might be devolved to a resident heron, cormorant or otter is not one that should be lightly expressed. Five hundred years ago, it would have been a mark of insanity, and perhaps still is.

  The salmon which thrashed their way up the Esk and the Liddel every year in wildly varying numbers to their spawning grounds came close to causing a war between Scotland and England. Some time before 1474, when the matter was discussed at Westminster, the poor cottagers who lived among the ruins of Roman Netherby constructed a ‘fish garth’ across the Esk. Often described as a dike of sand and pebbles – which the Esk would easily have demolished – the garth was probably a dead hedge or a net held in place by stakes. Since the opposite bank lay in the unpopulated Debatable Land, the garth-builders met with no resistance.

  That spring, while the people of Netherby netted, stabbed and scooped up the frustrated fish, the monks of Canonbie and the people of upper Eskdale waited in vain for the salmon to arrive. Drawing the obvious conclusion, they trooped downstream to dismantle the fish garth and struck the first blow in a dispute which sputtered on for nearly three hundred years.

  In the days when protein was harder to come by, fish were a vital resource. It was because of fish that the boundaries of the Debatable Land were first surveyed and recorded – in 1494 and 1510 – and no one found anything odd in the report that, before the Battle of Flodden, James IV, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, had proposed to fight in single combat for ‘the Towne of Berwicke and the Fisigarthis on the West Marches’.

  The first permanent occupation of the Debatable Land in over two thousand years was a murkier business and the motives of those involved are harder to grasp. The only ‘fishing’ associated with the reivers is the practice of ‘scumfishing’ (etymologically unrelated), which meant surrounding a pele tower with a smouldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants. The ostensible cause of the incursions was an increase in the human population and the system of partible inheritance. As in many upland parts of England, property was divided equally among the male heirs. When the population grew, the system of clans or surnames struggled to cope with this fragmentation of estates. A young man who saw his future livelihood reduced to a thatched hovel and a sodden field, and who had tasted the excitement of war and profited from its spoils, was likely to question his allegiance to a ‘laird’, who might be nothing but an old farmer with a house built of stone and a bloated sense of his own importance.

  The ‘broken men’ or ‘clanless loons’ who refused to recognize a laird’s authority might retain their surnames and even start their own branch or ‘grayne’. If they were strong in numbers, they would be outlaws only in name. The romantic notion of undying loyalty to a hoary clan chief is misleading: this was a relatively fluid system, supported by common Border law rather than by the whims of a feudal lord. But there was something shockingly modern in the irruption of reiving families into the Debatable Land.

  In 1521, the Scottish author of A History of Greater Britain wrote of a ‘terra inhabitata’ between England and Scotland. He must have seen or heard about the Debatable Land in the last days of its independence. By the time his book was published, men who did not share the veneration of their forefathers were creeping along the Esk and encroaching on the ancient boundaries. Ignoring the law which prohibited the erection of any permanent structure, they came like colonists to a new frontier. Although the deeper mosses and the hilly interior remained empty, the fringes were soon dotted with crofts, and ploughs tore into grassland which had remained uncultivated for countless generations.

  *

  These interlopers felt allegiance neither to Scotland nor to England, but their encroachment on the Debatable Land inevitably had international implications. A Scottish army had recently invaded England. The plan had been to distract Henry VIII from his attack on northern France, in accordance with the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland. The result was the Battle of Flodden (1513), at which James IV and thousands of Scottish soldiers lost their lives.

  This military disaster still looms large in the national consciousness, but it was spectacularly untypical of Anglo-Scottish relations. Fourteen years after the defeat of Edward II by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn, Scottish independence and the existing border had been recognized by the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton (1328). When James IV invaded England in 1513, he was breaking a more recent treaty of ‘Perpetual Peace’ signed with England in 1502. Until Henry VIII began to devastate the borderlands there was hostility but little open warfare. The battles of Otterburn (1388), Sark (1448) and Flodden (1513) were border raids rather than full-scale invasions. Some Scottish historians have tentatively suggested that more attention should be paid to ‘evidence for peaceful Anglo-Scottish accommodation and exchange’.

  Before and after Flodden, both countries pursued a defence policy of harrying and dissuasion. It was cheaper to launch punitive raids than to maintain a barrier of fortresses from the Solway Firth to the North Sea. (A later proposal to build a new Hadrian’s Wall on the borderline was neve
r seriously considered.) Since the Debatable Land was respected by the borderers themselves, it had proved to be a useful buffer zone. The ancient local law had been repeatedly confirmed by parliamentary decrees: ‘the Landes callid Batabil Landes or Threpelandes’ were not to be occupied in any way, ‘nor by lande nor by water’, except in times of truce, and even then, ‘as it hath been done in time of other truces’, there was to be no ‘pyndyng’ or ‘parcage’ (impounding or penning of livestock).

  The illegal settlements of the 1510s were therefore something quite new. They might have been an effect of the increase in population, but they also suggest a breakdown in the moral order. The occupation of the Debatable Land began not long after the catastrophe at Flodden. Armies did not always dutifully disperse when the fighting was over: their wages consisted largely of plunder, and some of the worst acts of violence were committed a long way from the battlefield. A group of Armstrongs who had fought as mercenaries might have decided to maximize their profits on their way home from Flodden. In the valley of the Esk, they found a fertile realm naturally defended by the river and its cliffs and conveniently devoid of other human beings.

  *

  The first hint that miscreants had broken into the Debatable Land and set up ‘stob and staik’16 is a letter to the English Privy Council from Thomas Dacre, Warden-General of the English Marches. Baron Dacre of Gilsland had fought at Flodden: it was he who had discovered the body of the Scottish king on the battlefield. In May 1514, eight months after the battle, Dacre led a raid along ‘6 miles of the water of Esk from Stabulgorton [Staplegordon, north of Langholm] down to Cannonby’.

  Noticing the new settlements along the banks of the Esk, and mindful of the weakness of the defeated Scots, Dacre sensed an opportunity to reinforce the border. More than two years later, in August 1516, he revealed his sly policy in a letter to the new Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey: ‘I have four hundred outlaws and give rewards to them that burn and destroy daily in Scotland, all of them being Scotsmen who should be under the obeisance of Scotland.’ Though the surname may have originated in Cumberland and Northumberland, the Armstrongs were nominally Scottish subjects, which meant that England could not be held responsible for their actions . . .

  It is unclear from Dacre’s letter whether or not any of those four hundred outlaws were based in the Debatable Land. Since the Debatable Land was covered by international treaties, he would have been careful not to mention it in any case. But a few months later, a decree issued by the Scottish Privy Council (18 May 1517) showed that the ancient spell had been broken. This is the first definite evidence that outlaws were operating from inside the Debatable Land. The thieving ‘clans and surnames’ of Liddesdale were to be granted immunity from prosecution for the space of a year in return for pledges of their good behaviour. This offer was extended to the clans ‘now duelland in the Debatable Land and Woddis [woods]’.

  By 1518, Dacre’s policy of ‘daily destruction’ was an open secret. The Scottish Privy Council was informed that while the Croziers, Elliots, Forsters, Hendersons and Nixons had given pledges, no such guarantees had been received from the Armstrongs: ‘Thai ar in the Debatable landis, and agreit [in agreement] with Ingland’. Dacre, still glorious after the victory at Flodden, believed in his influence over the border reivers, but the Scots knew already that the forces which were being unleashed would be hard to control.

  *

  Though he wrote with the arrogance of an Allied commander boasting of the long-term cooperation of an Afghan tribe, Thomas Dacre had reason to be confident. While the prolific Armstrongs staked their claim to the northern sector, the southern half of the Debatable Land was being infiltrated by the similarly burgeoning tribe of Grahams. The headman, ‘Lang Will’, had recently been banished from Scotland for unknown acts of violence. With the connivance of Dacre, who helpfully expelled the previous inhabitants, the Storeys, ‘Lang Will’ and his eight sons set themselves up on the English side of the Esk and quickly expanded across the river into the Debatable Land to build houses on the edge of Solway Moss.

  From Dacre’s point of view, this was a happy state of affairs. The West March – along with his own extensive properties in Cumberland – would be safe behind a frontier guarded by ruthless, corruptible warriors. He would hold the Debatable Land by proxy as a no man’s land from which attacks could be launched into Scottish territory. He himself could deny any liability for the destruction they caused. He also knew that this was a policy dear to the heart of Henry VIII, who liked to imagine his border patrolled by English war dogs thirsting for Scottish blood and waiting for the royal command, ‘Let slip Tynedale and Redesdale to join with Liddersdale to the annoyance of Scotland’.

  Dacre’s dream of unattributable ‘annoyance’ was disturbed – momentarily, he thought – on the morning of 23 June 1517, when four hundred Scotsmen, including Herbert Maxwell, the brother of the Scottish warden, rode out of Dumfriesshire into the newly occupied Debatable Land and carried off seven hundred cows and oxen which had been illegally pastured overnight on Hedderskale bog. This robust official response to the English-funded incursions was followed by several years of diplomatic bickering, each side claiming that the other had entered and occupied the Debatable Land, thereby forfeiting any right to have their property restored.

  The impasse soon led to a change of policy, but it would be a long time before the lessons were learned. The ‘dogs of war’ attached and detached their leashes at will. They were, as a later warden observed in exasperation, ‘Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure’ (here). The Armstrongs were just as likely to set fire to a Northumbrian farm as a Scottish croft. And there would be many other surprises for the wardens of both sides.

  Even after the invasion of Armstrongs and Grahams, few people apart from cowherds and shepherds had actually seen the interior of the Debatable Land. It had yet to be discovered, let alone conquered. The region was considered to be ‘wasteland’, as it still is today by the prospectors of electricity and wind-power companies. Yet the sudden appearance of animal pens and tilled fields showed how productive the land could be.

  More significantly for the wardens who would spend their professional lives trying to root out the ‘wilde and mysguyded menn’ of the Debatable Land, its treacherous bogs and trackless moors, its ancient woods of oak and hazel, its river gorges and panoramic vistas made it an almost impregnable fortress. Until then, it seemed to have been protected by a cloak of invisibility; now, it was revealed to be one of the most formidable strongholds on the frontier. In 1541, Thomas Wharton, deputy warden of the West March, who had served on the border for twenty years, ventured into the Debatable Land to investigate reports that the Scottish warden was encouraging reiving families to settle there. He scanned that long-deserted land with the eye of a military commander, and what he saw was not reassuring:

  That same Debatable grounde hath ever been, is now, and is likely to remain, unless it can be reformed, a very great cause of breaches of the peace. There could be no stronger place for the harbouring of offenders. Without the sight I have had of it, I could not have believed it to be so strong as it is.

  *

  The Armstrongs having proved untameable, Dacre came up with a new policy, which he presented as a scrupulous application of the law. The ancient edict which ensured the neutrality of the Debatable Land stated that livestock left there overnight could be removed and any buildings demolished. Dacre interpreted this as a licence to wreak havoc. As he put it in a letter to the Council of Scotland – which took much the same view – each side was legally entitled ‘to brenne, destroye, waiste, take and drive awey all suche goods and cattell as there shalbe founde so wilfully kept under cover of night’. Never before had the ancient rule been so vociferously respected and its spirit so blatantly ignored.

  Laying waste to the Borders was normal practice for both England and Scotland. After the victory at Flodden, which is traditionally taken to mark the final securing of England’s northern f
rontier, raiding went on as before. Only eight months after the battle, Dacre sent an immodest report to the English Privy Council, detailing the number of Scottish towns he had destroyed, the acreage of crops burned and the livestock captured: the balance sheet showed one hundred cows for every cow lost to Scotland and twice as many sheep.

  At no point was there any question of conquering land from Scotland. The idea was simply to maintain a zone of anarchy and devastation. The crofters of the Scottish lowlands and the great landowning families of the Borders – some of whom could be relied upon to make war on one another – would be kept in a state of ruin and distraction, and neither side would ever gain the upper hand. Ideally, there would be no one left to fight and nothing left to fight for, ‘except’, as Dacre told Cardinal Wolsey in 1524, ‘only remnants of old houses from which the thatch and coverings had been removed to prevent their being burnt’.

  Thomas Dacre fell from his horse and died in October 1525. His brutal strategy of destabilization was now extended by his son William to the Debatable Land, which, though technically disputed, had been the most peaceful region anywhere between Carlisle and Edinburgh. ‘Young’ Dacre (who was in his mid-thirties) realized that allowing the Armstrongs to occupy the natural fortress had been a mistake. It gave them a secure base from which to launch their reiving expeditions and it only served to spread the infection of anarchy into England. Meanwhile, the common reivers, who were quite accustomed to dismantling and rebuilding their wooden houses in a day, continued to gallop east along the Roman Wall and across the Bewcastle Waste to reive sheep and cattle from Northumberland. Despite the soldiers at his disposal, Young Dacre found himself impotent even on home ground: ‘None of the people of Beaucastell assisted or scoured the field. The garrison of Carlisle refused to come out.’