by Graham Robb
Many servants brought in the meat, with blue caps on their heads, the table being more than half furnished with great platters of porridge, each having a little sodden meat. When the table was served, the servants sat down with us; but the upper mess instead of porridge, had a pullet with some prunes in the broth, and I observed no art of cookery or house-hold stuff, but rude neglect of both.
Domestic luxury was never uppermost in a reiver’s mind. Proverbially, they deemed it ‘better to hear the chirp of the bird than the cheep of the mouse’. But to wardens who had known the pleasures of a modern city, life in the Borders could be purgatory. Peregrine Bertie, the sad and exasperated warden of the East March, wrote to Robert Cecil in December 1600: ‘Yf I were further from the tempestuousnes of Cheviot hills, and were once retired from this accursed country, whence the sunn is so removed, I would not change my homlyest hermitage for the highest pallace ther.’ He envied Cecil ‘the sun of the South’ and prayed ‘that one rayon of such brightnes may deliver me from the darknes heere, which I protest is no less to me than Hell!’
Recruitment was a constant problem, as it is today: professional posts in North Cumbria often lie vacant for months and tend to attract applicants whose principal motivation lies in fell walking and other rugged pursuits. Some wardens refused to serve; others manufactured their own sunshine: the deputy warden of the Middle March, according to Robert Carey’s report in 1595, was ‘so given over to drunkenness, that if he cannot get company, he will sit in a chair in his chamber and drink himself drunk before he rises!’ The drunkard’s father, Sir John Forster, had been warden since 1560 but was now quite immobile and demented. ‘These be our chief officers that rule our country. I refer it to your honour’s discretion whether there be not high time for redress.’
As usual, the catalysts of political change were bad weather, bad harvests, hunger and plague, which reached Carlisle in 1597 and killed one-third of the population of under two thousand. To stiffen the mouldering framework of the Marches, it would have taken a man of vision and authority – a man quite unlike Thomas Scrope, tenth Baron Scrope of Bolton, who served as warden of the West March throughout the hungry 1590s.
Scrope had neither the cunning nor the military experience of his father Henry. After taking up the post at the age of twenty-six in August 1593, Young Scrope sent a nervous report from Carlisle on the state of the Borders to the Privy Council in Westminster: ‘The frontier here is very broken at present – with the liberty long enjoyed by the evil men, changes at the Scottish court, indifference of the opposite warden [Buccleuch] to justice – and will be worse as the nights grow long.’ He ended his letter, rather oddly, with a promise to send a map of the Debatable Land as soon as he could find one.
Through the eyes of Thomas Scrope, the world as it appeared to an Elizabethan border official can be seen as clearly as the starry night sky over Liddesdale. It is strange to hear the English warden, this late in the day, still talking of that abolished land in the West Marches. He might have been a colonial officer recently posted to a distant province which had been abandoned in haste by his predecessor. Not only was the Debatable Land still a recognizable entity, it was still, incredibly, terra incognita to the Englishman who should have known it better than any other officer of the crown.
Elizabeth I and her Privy Council wanted to know exactly where Scotland met England in the West Marches. Eventually, in April 1597, Scrope managed to find a ‘mapp or card’ on which ‘the English Bateable grounds’ were shaded in the ‘murrow colour’ (purplish-red) and the Scottish in ‘read culler’. The document itself has disappeared but Scrope’s description makes the conclusion inescapable: his map was forty-five years out of date. He was working with a copy of Henry Bullock’s map of 1552 in its earliest state, before the final partition was marked on it.
The border as Scrope imagined it is not the actual border but, bizarrely, that of ‘the Scots’ offer’, running from the north-western tip of the Debatable Land at Hawburnfoot to a point on the river Esk almost one and a half miles south of the Scots’ Dike. Scrope knew that there was an earthen dyke, but not where it was. In his conception, the dividing line would have been almost at right angles to the real one, and the local political situation would have been the reverse of what it was, with the Grahams in Scotland and the Armstrongs in England.
This astonishing ignorance in the Queen’s representative, which any native could easily have dispelled, might account for Scrope’s jitteriness. In his house within the castle walls, where the candlelight played on the parchment blotches of purple and red, he could see no farther than his own muddy reflection in the black panes. Even in daylight, he was operating in the dark. While his counterpart Buccleuch knew every lonning and moss-trooper’s path between the Solway and the Tyne, Scrope was sending his soldiers out into a vague and subjectively vast zone to the north of Carlisle with only the foggiest notion of where they were heading.
Such geographical vagueness was not unusual. A traveller today either follows directions or translates the lines on a map into motion. Almost everyone shares the same perception of time and space. The medieval borderlands were a world of several coincident spheres, each with its own population. In contrast to Scrope’s guesswork and Henry Bullock’s cartographic niceties, the mental geography of a moss-trooper varied with the length of day, the seasonal changes in terrain and the tell-tale sounds of rivers and birdsong. The beacons on the roofs of pele towers sometimes endowed the landscape with the orderliness of a map, but when the fires had died down on a moonless night, there were no lights to pick out the river valleys or the summits of the hills. The view of the Debatable Land from the edge of Skurrlywarble Wood was entirely dark.
*
Even Carlisle was crazed with hedges and dunghills. The only stone buildings in that city of wattle and daub were the cathedral, the castle and the citadel at Botchergate. Sixteenth-century Carlisle was the small, decaying capital of an almost roadless frontier zone. Trade beyond Cumberland was practically non-existent. Its rivers were unnavigable and it was frequently cut off from its hinterland by ‘greate waters and flouds’, and even more by fear of the lands to the north, whether Scottish or English. For reasons of security, citizens of Carlisle were forbidden to employ apprentices born beyond Blackford, which is less than four miles north of the city centre.
The border forts were crumbling like old teeth. A wall of Berwick Castle had collapsed and part of the jail at Hexham ‘was newlie comde to the grounde’. By 1604, the fortress at Bewcastle was ‘in great ruine and decaye in such sorte that there is not anye roome therof wherein a man maye sytt drye’. Without fresh money from London, Carlisle Castle would soon be of no more use than one of the ruined milecastles on the Roman Wall. Even if the castle could be patched, the personnel were beyond repair: in 1596, the only man in Carlisle who knew how to fire a cannon was a butcher by trade and ‘not worth his pay’. An urgent request was made in February for a proper cannoneer who could instruct others in the science of gunnery, ‘wherof they have noe smale need at Carlisle’.
On the night of 13 April 1596, a Cumbrian rain was falling on the city. This meteorological phenomenon has no specific name and the local weather forecast never does justice to it. ‘Light rain in the morning will give way to more prolonged showers in the afternoon.’ The phrase ‘give way to’ is not quite accurate. The light rain will continue to fall while, from another section of the celestial orchestra, heavy drizzle joins in to the accompaniment of a thudding downpour, until the coincidence of precipitations creates a deafening deluge of unpredictable duration from which the earth will emerge, not refreshed, but beaten up and rearranged. This rain-within-rain is described by Hugh Walpole in his Cumbrian novel, Rogue Herries, as ‘the especial and peculiar property of the district’; it falls with ‘a fanatical obstinacy . . . in sheets of steely straightness, and through it is the rhythm of the beating hammer’.
A few walls from Scrope’s residence in the castle, a dangerous prisoner was bein
g held. A month before, Scrope’s deputy, Thomas Salkeld, had arrested the arch-reiver and denizen of the Debatable Land, Kinmont Willie, after a truce-day meeting on the border at Day Holm, two miles upstream from the confluence of Kershopeburn and Liddel Water. Salkeld had left the holm with two hundred riders and was returning to Carlisle on the English side of the Liddel when he spotted Kinmont Willie and the Scottish deputy, who had attended the meeting, riding along on the Scottish bank. After giving chase, Salkeld and his men crossed the Liddel, surrounded the reiver and took him back to Carlisle.
This reckless arrest has never been explained. Kinmont Willie was a known murderer and, more importantly, had led a reiver army of a thousand horsemen into England. But arresting a man on a day of truce was a crime against March law and was bound to cause trouble. An explanation may lie in the geography of the chase. The road on the Scottish side of the Liddel is visible from England only between Kershopefoot and Penton Bridge. As far as the bridge, it would have been easy to track the progress of Kinmont Willie, just as some passengers of the 127 bus wait indoors on rainy days until they see the white dot inching its way across the hillside in Scotland. The capture of Kinmont Willie must have taken place along this stretch of the river, where the Liddel was still fordable. The main crossing point was Rutterford, four miles from Kershopefoot, on the edge of the Debatable Land. Perhaps Salkeld believed that by capturing the reiver inside the Debatable Land, he was absolved of the crime of truce-breaking.
Instead of releasing Kinmont Willie, Scrope had decided to hold him in Carlisle Castle, hoping that some lasting pledge of good behaviour would be received. He thought incessantly of his opposite number, the Scottish warden, Buccleuch, whose letters and messages always contained ‘a note of pryde in him selfe and of his skorne towardes me . . . a backwardness to justice, except that kind that he desired, which was solely for the profit of his own friends’. One of those ‘friends’ was Kinmont Willie, and perhaps his incarceration would give Scrope some influence over Buccleuch . . .
So far, no pledges had been forthcoming. Scrope knew from his spies that Buccleuch had organized a day of horse racing at Langholm, where the principal reivers would be present, but he knew nothing of all the dealings that had been taking place in and around the Debatable Land, at Tower of Sark, at Carwinley and at Archerbeck, where ‘speeches’ had been made about ‘her Majesties castle of Carlel and the deliverie from thence of Kinmonth’.
That night, the watch at Carlisle Castle – excepting the two who lay dead at the gate – were either drunk, fast asleep or, as Scrope later reported, ‘were gotten under some covert to defende them selves from the violence of the wether’. At some point, a hammering which was not that of the rain became audible. Venturing from their hidey-hole onto the battlements, the guards saw either forty, eighty, two hundred or five hundred horsemen (accounts vary) issuing from the castle and cantering away in the direction of the river. Since Carlisle Castle usually contained no more than thirty horsemen, the fact was as obvious as it could be to a befuddled guard: the riders had come from outside the castle and were now returning to the darkness beyond the Eden bridges. At the head of the galloping throng – ‘With spur on heel, and splent on spauld,25 / And gleuves of green, and feathers blue’ – were Kinmont Willie and the bold Buccleuch.
*
Here, the disjunction of reality and border legend is at its most blatant. The Ballad of Kinmont Willie is such a well-crafted work of literature that it has been used a thousand times to tell the tale of rough-and-ready but righteous reivers restoring natural justice with a smile and a song.
O have ye na heard o the fause Sakelde?
O have ye na heard o the keen26 Lord Scroop?
How they hae taen bauld Kinmont Willie,
On Hairibee27 to hang him up?
. . .
Now word is gane to the bauld Keeper,
In Branksome Ha28 where that he lay,
That Lord Scroope has taen the Kinmont Willie
Between the hours of night and day.
. . .
‘And have they taen him Kinmont Willie,
Against the truce of Border tide,
And forgotten that the bauld Bacleuch
Is keeper here on the Scottish side?
. . .
‘I would set that castell in a low,
And sloken it with English blood;29
There’s nevir a man in Cumberland
Should ken where Carlisle castell stood.
. . .
And as we crossed the Bateable Land,
When to the English side we held,
The first o men that we met wi,
Whae sould it be but fause Sakelde!
‘Where be ye gaun, ye hunters keen?’
Quo fause Sakelde; ‘Come tell to me!’
‘We go to hunt an English stag,
Has trespassed on the Scots countrie.’
The ballad’s swaggering nationalism has no parallel in contemporary records of the reivers. The diminutive ‘Willie’ is an impish paragon of resistance to cruel and pompous tyrants, while the bold Buccleuch is a swashbuckling defender of Scottish pride. The tone of indignation is false: there was never any question of hanging Kinmont Willie, and although his arrest was a breach of March law, Buccleuch himself was in this regard a very dirty pot to Scrope’s black kettle.
For tenant farmers of the borderlands, the tyrants most to be feared were men like Kinmont Willie and Buccleuch. This is not the authentic voice of the ‘little people’ standing up to corrupt superiors and English aggressors. The raid on Carlisle Castle was a thoroughly Anglo-Scottish enterprise. The way had been prepared by the English Grahams – one of whom was the wife of Kinmont Willie – and by Thomas Carleton, Scrope’s former deputy, a known traitor. This is, as George MacDonald Fraser said, ‘a bombastic piece of Scottish propaganda at its worst’ – or, considering its literary qualities, its best. It is, in fact, strikingly reminiscent of the broadsheets and ballads that were sold in cities. Nationalism of this kind was predominantly urban, as it was four centuries later in the Scottish Referendum. The ‘burgess of Edinburgh’, Robert Birrell, recorded the event in his diary in terms which suggest that the news of Kinmont Willie’s escape had already been digested for a literate audience by professional writers.30 This would explain why the lost original adapted by Walter Scott had the raiding party reaching Carlisle Castle by crossing the Esk rather than the Eden – a mistake that no borderer would have made.
*
The dent to national pride was exclusively the concern of monarchs and their councillors. Queen Elizabeth was furious at being made a laughing stock by ‘a night laroun’31 who had broken into one of her castles and stolen a state prisoner. James’s affable but aggravating attempts to mollify her were not immediately successful. He agreed that Buccleuch had behaved badly and suggested to the Queen’s ambassador that the reiver would have done better to smuggle Kinmont out ‘by secret passage through some window or such like practice’.
The Queen wrote to her ambassador in Edinburgh: ‘I wonder how base mynded that Kinge thinks me that with patience I can disgest this dishonourable [a blank in the transcription]. Let him therefor kno that I will have satisfaction or els.’ The offer of a trial infuriated her all the more: why should such a wretch be granted the dignity of judicial proceedings when ‘the breach in the door and wall of the castle can be seen by anyone who is not blind or that has but one eye’? She had to settle eventually for the brief captivity of Buccleuch at Berwick, where, though he was reported to be ‘growing werie of the towne, and so more daungerous to be kepte’, he ‘behaved him selfe verie well and orderlie’.
As for Scrope, he was beside himself with rage and embarrassment – for himself rather than for his country. His epic petulance was not something that would have lent itself to a jolly ballad: that summer, three months after Kinmont Willie’s escape, Scrope’s vengeance swept through Liddesdale and the Debatable Land in a series of raids, the most vicious of which
took place in August 1596 on the banks of the Liddel near Newcastleton.
It might have been a scene from the early period of colonial conquest. Soldiers burned down every dwelling along a four-mile stretch of the river. They tied the prisoners ‘two and two together on a leash like dogs’, while the women and children ‘were stripped of their clothes and sarks, leaving them naked and exposed to the injury of wind and weather, whereby nine or ten infants perished within the following eight days’.
The Scottish complaints were inconsistent and exaggerated, but there was no question that Scrope had overstepped the mark. Elizabeth’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, warned Scrope that such force should be applied only in extremis and reminded him to use more diplomatic language in his reports: King James of Scotland might soon be king of both countries. Scrope insisted that his raid had been a legal reprisal permitted by ancient border law, which called it a ‘pune’.32 Moreover, the women left naked in their native bogs with their terrorized children, were, in comparison with Buccleuch’s outrages, ‘as pictures and shadowes to bodies and lyfe’ – an unconsciously appropriate image. The raid, in any case, had been conducted in ‘the greatest heat of somer’, and where was the harm in spending a night or two naked on bare moorland after four years of bad harvests and a day of slaughter and destruction, with the wind blowing in off the estuary which modern Cumbrians ruefully refer to as the Costa del Solway?
The son of an equally ruthless but far more effective father, Scrope found himself strangely alone. His was the cry of the functionary overwhelmed by his own very public incompetence: ‘What else could I have done?’ While Buccleuch and the inexterminable tribe of reivers continued to burn, rob and murder, Scrope begged the Privy Council to send more men: ‘The dishonour to her Majesty by the insolent pride of Buccleuch . . . is intolerable, and I fear, to the shame of manhood, I shall sit without revenge, unless you assist me with some forces.’
