by Graham Robb
21
Tarras Moss
It is impossible to know how much deeper into anarchy the Borders might have sunk if Scrope had not asked his brother-in-law, Robert Carey, to become his deputy. Despite the family connection, Carey was one of the ‘new men’ of the later Elizabethan age – men whose power was rooted in intelligence, enterprise and experience rather than inherited wealth. When Carey came to Carlisle and lodged in the castle with his wife, he was almost penniless, having contracted debts in London, but he had that rarest of qualities in Border officials: the ability to make himself liked.
Carey seems to have been the first warden to understand that killing people and torching their houses was counter-productive. Later, as warden of the English Middle March, he dealt with some persistent Scottish poachers by smashing the carts in which they hauled away the deer and then inviting them to his home: ‘I made them welcome, and gave them the best entertainment that I could . . . and so we continued good neighbours ever after.’ Amazingly, he found the reformed Buccleuch an easy man to work with, ‘the onelye man that hath runn a dyrect course with me for the mayntenaunce of justice’. He even won over the homicidal Scottish warden of the East March, Robert Kerr of Cessford, who rivalled Buccleuch in cruelty. To the surprise of Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, who put him in charge of the Middle March in 1596, Carey refused the offer of a hundred horsemen. Forty would suffice, ‘and they to be my own servants, and resident with me in my own house’. To Carey, it was a matter of pride – and professional calculation – to cost the Treasury as little as possible.
Carey’s enlightened approach to personnel management helped him to win one of the most telling victories over the reiver warlords. Though several years would pass before the Borders and the Debatable Land were free from the outlaws’ reign of terror, and though it would take the Union of the Crowns to loosen the grip of the self-serving wardens, Carey’s coordinated offensive on Tarras Moss in the summer of 1601 showed that reivers could be defeated and reduced to a manageable rabble of ‘inbred thieves’.
*
The Scottish warden of the West March, Sir John Carmichael, had recently made himself unpopular by refusing to turn a blind eye to the Armstrongs’ raids. He was also unusual in working closely with his opposite number, Scrope. For the reivers, Carmichael was a man not to be trusted, precisely because he was trustworthy. On 16 June 1600, he was riding back to Langholm from Annan when he was ambushed by eighteen riders – two Englishmen and sixteen Scots, one of whom was ‘Lang Sandy’, the Armstrong whose statue now stands near the bus stop in Rowanburn. Carmichael raced away but was shot in the back and stripped of his possessions. His corpse was carted off to Lochmaben. The tale that he was killed because one of his men had taunted an Armstrong and filled his scabbard with egg yolk – which prevents the sword from being drawn – has no foundation. Carmichael was murdered because he was an honest policeman.
The acting warden of the English West March, Richard Lowther, realized that this assassination was not an isolated incident but the start of a new war: ‘I cannot keep this March, for now the thieves will ride.’ The Armstrongs and their allies at once launched a series of raids, mostly in Scotland but reaching as far south as Stanwix on the edge of Carlisle. The Bishop of Carlisle was preaching there when eighty riders descended on the suburb, stole every horse they could find and wounded the bishop’s sister-in-law.
Meanwhile, in the Middle March, Carey had had a relatively peaceful time of it, but now that the weather had improved, the Armstrong army, numbering about one hundred and fifty, was extending its operations to the east, on both sides of the border:
England and Scotland is all one to them, and they fear no officers of either side. They are so well provided with stolen horses, and the strengths they lie in so fortified with bog and wood, that they know a small force cannot hurt them. They have begun to spoil in this March . . . and are like to do more before winter be done.
Carey had been covering hundreds of miles on horseback, discussing strategy with his Scottish counterparts. He had met King James on a diplomatic mission. The King had enjoyed Carey’s company and now gave him permission to operate in both countries: ‘He was well pleased I should do my worst to [the outlaws], if I took them in England, and if I sought them in Scotland he would not mislike it, but had commanded all assistance to be given me.’ This was to be the key to lasting control of the Borders. James was inviting Carey to behave as though the two nations were already united.
None of this was apparent to the marauding Armstrongs, nor to those crop-destroying ‘caterpillers’, the Grahams, as Scrope called them. They seem to have been oblivious to the changing international scene. They knew only that the Laird of Buccleuch had become inconveniently uncorrupt and could no longer be relied upon to ignore their raids. Sim Armstrong of Whithaugh (near Newcastleton), who had been held as a pledge at York Castle after the murder of warden Carmichael, had escaped and returned to the West March, where he was now proclaiming that ‘all fugitives, Scots or English, who join them, shall be aided and protected . . . so that all honest men will rue the time they came home’.
The winter, as usual, passed off quietly enough. It was not until early May the following year (1601) that the trouble began. A small town near the boundary of the West and Middle Marches was set on fire and hostages were taken. Carey retaliated in kind, rescuing the prisoners, burning the raiders’ houses and, crucially, taking their best horses: ‘I have power enough, and will weary them with their own weapons.’
Then news reached Carey from Hartwisell (now Haltwhistle), the Northumbrian market town below the Roman Wall near the borders of Cumberland. Hartwisell was a stronghold of the Ridleys, who were sworn enemies of the Armstrongs. They were used to defending their town against raiders from the west. Chains would be stretched across the bridges, forcing invaders to use the heavily defended fords. Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London who was martyred in 1555, grew up at the nearby Unthank Hall and remembered the thrills of a boyhood in the heart of reiving country:
In Tynedale, where I was born, not far from the Scottish borders, I have known my countrymen watch night and day in their harness, such as they had, that is, in their jacks, and their spears in their hands . . . especially when they had any privy warning of the coming of the Scots. And so doing, although at every such bickering33 some of them spent their lives, yet by such means, like pretty men, they defended their country.
Two years before, those ‘pretty men’ had tried to have the Armstrongs massacred at their football game in Bewcastle (here). This time, one of the Ridleys managed to lodge a spear in the body of Sim Armstrong, who came from Cat Hill (Cadgill) on the western boundary of the Debatable Land. Sim died of his wound and, as though this had been the point of the first attack, the Armstrongs vowed revenge, promising that, ‘before the next winter was ended they would leave the whole country waste [and] there should be none to resist them’.
A few nights later, the Armstrongs came again. They burst into town with burning torches, plundering the houses and ‘running up and down the streets with lights in their hands to set more houses on fire’. Taking aim from the window of a stone house, a Ridley shot dead ‘one of the sons of the chiefest outlaw’. Enraged but undeterred, the Armstrongs for the second time made ‘bloody vows of deep revenge’ and the entire country beyond Liddesdale waited for the storm to break.
*
It is not just a lucky chance that Robert Carey wrote his memoirs. He loved a well-turned plot and a lively adventure in which an inferior but more intelligent force was pitted against brute strength. In 1588, he had ridden to Portsmouth and jumped aboard a frigate which had taken him to within spitting distance of the Spanish Armada anchored off Calais. In 1601, after the burning of Haltwhistle, he found himself on a broad and windy stage, confronted by a many-headed enemy which had defied two nations for eighty years. He had only forty horsemen and an audience of thousands begging him to save them from the outlaws:
[
They] did assure me, that unless I did take some course with them by the end of that summer, there was none of the inhabitants durst or would stay in their dwellings the next winter, but they would fly the country, and leave their houses and lands to the fury of the outlaws.
Carey sought the advice of the gentlemen of Cumberland and Northumberland, who urged him to accept the government’s offer of a hundred horsemen, insisting that ‘there was no second means’. ‘Then I told them my intention’: he would take his forty riders into the wastes of Liddesdale and lie entrenched as close as possible to the outlaws whilst remaining just inside England. The idea proved unpopular with the old and cautious, but several young gentlemen promised to bring horses, and when a list of the volunteers was drawn up (including the servants who had been volunteered by their masters), Carey found himself at the head of a respectable force of ‘about two hundred good men and horse’. They agreed to meet in mid-June at the closest point of England to the Armstrong power base in upper Liddesdale. This would have been the grassy holm at the confluence of Liddel Water and Kershopeburn, just downstream from the Riverview Holiday Park for the over-fifties at Mangerton, where the ruins of an Armstrong pele tower can still be seen.
A tedious task was turned into a pleasant outing. Carey had several log cabins built, encircled by ‘a pretty fort’ on the banks of the river. These lodges may not have been as luxurious as the top-of-the-range ‘Reiver Liddesdale’ cabins of the holiday park, but they were equipped with beds and mattresses, and food and fodder were supplied by a doorstep delivery service: ‘The country people were well paid for anything they brought us, so that we had a good market everyday before our fort, to buy what we lacked.’
Not only was this an excellent means of reassuring the local population, it also obviated the need to leave the ‘fort’ and maintained a steady supply of information. The gentlemen and their servants settled in to enjoy the fishing while Carey planned the next phase of his operation.
*
On seeing the cavalry arrive, the outlaws had fled their homes and withdrawn ‘with all their goods’ into the moors of Tarras Moss. The moss was surrounded, as it is today, by bogs and areas of thick scrub. It is still an impressive sight, extending for miles on either side of the single-track road from Newcastleton to Langholm where often the only creatures to be seen, apart from butterflies and birds, are a herd of wild goats. Carey called it a ‘large and great forest’, and it is sometimes pictured as a secure and leafy refuge. But the trees have not changed their habits. A ‘forest’ was only occasionally wooded and, in Scotland, more often mountainous and bare. It was usually a wide, open area where deer could be hunted. On Tarras Moss, there were patches of alder, birch, hazel and willow along the glens, but on the whole, unlike the banks of the Liddel, it was not a pleasant place in which to spend the summer.34
A sneering message was brought down from the moss-bound Armstrongs: they hoped that Carey would remain there as long as the weather allowed and make the best of the Liddesdale wastes. Come winter, he would have no rest. His offensive was nothing but ‘the first puffe of a haggasse’. Haggis was served piping hot, and when the sheep’s stomach was punctured, it let out a jet of steam and a suitably intestinal noise. This throw-back to the days when soldiers opened hostilities with a barrage of insults might have come from a Border ballad were it not for the absence of any reference to nationality in the Armstrongs’ bluster. (The haggis became a national emblem only after the publication of Robert Burns’s ode to the ‘Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race’ in 1786. At the time, it was primarily a dish of northern England.)
The fact that Carey recorded the haggis insult in his memoirs shows that he had none of Scrope’s disastrous sensitivity to provocation. As a crafty commander, he delighted in a boastful enemy. A ‘muffled man’35 – either a local scout or an Armstrong turncoat – was chosen to lead one hundred and fifty horsemen into Scotland. After riding north for twenty miles, they turned and headed back towards the border by a different route. On the edge of Tarras Moss, still undetected by the reivers, they split into three groups and covered the three escape routes to the north. The most important of these would have been the dilapidated but still usable Roman road, last shown on a map of 1821, which left the fort of Broomholm in the direction of Melrose. While the three detachments blocked the exits, the Armstrongs posted scouts on the hilltops looking south towards England.
At four o’clock on 4 July, at the first blush of dawn, Carey attacked, as expected, from the south. King James must have sent reinforcements since the battalion now numbered one thousand soldiers and three hundred ‘horses’, which, in view of the terrain, would have been moss-troopers’ ponies. The Armstrongs abandoned their animals and possessions and fled into the bogs of outer Liddesdale, only to discover the triple ambush. Most of them escaped, but three of the ringleaders were captured and brought back, unharmed, to the cabins by the river, along with the stolen sheep and cattle, which were returned to their owners.
Two hundred years later, when Walter Scott rode into Liddesdale in search of ballads and folklore, he was told the tale of ‘Carey’s Raid’ – a romance of olden days when those rollicking Robin Hoods of the Borders had shown a pompous southerner what northern men were made of.
They tell, that, while he was besieging the outlaws in the Tarras they contrived, by ways known only to themselves, to send a party into England, who plundered the warden’s lands. On their return, they sent Carey one of his own cows, telling him, that, fearing he might fall short of provision during his visit to Scotland, they had taken the precaution of sending him some English beef.
The ‘uncommodious’ house to which Carey had removed his wife, children and servants lay more than fifty miles to the east, at Widdrington near the Northumbrian coast. There is no record of an outlaws’ raid on Widdrington. A face-saving anecdote must have been spun into a flattering tale and recounted by generations of borderers whose enjoyment of the story was unimpaired by knowledge of the facts. Something of that humour born of humiliation can still be heard in the merry boasting of Liddesdale raconteurs, though even at the annual Newcastleton Traditional Music Festival, it would be hard to find a minstrel who knew the true tale of Carey’s Raid.
22
‘A Factious and Naughty People’
The weather changes quickly on the high moors of Liddesdale. When the clouds are spilling over the Border fells or surging up the valley, a green hillside shining in the sun can suddenly turn black. In that volatile landscape, the rout of a band of reivers camped out on Tarras Moss seems inconsequential from whichever side the tale is told. It was far from being the last skirmish between reivers and government troops. In 1649, the author of a guide to Newcastle upon Tyne and its hinterland recalled the time when there were wardens of the East, West and Middle Marches ‘who had power by martial law to repress all enormities and outrages’. To this day, he wrote, the ‘country that William the Conqueror did not subdue’ observes its own laws and customs: ‘Highlanders’ come down from the dales to steal horses and cattle with such cunning that another thief must be employed to steal the animals back. They ‘subject themselves to no justice’ ‘but bang it out bravely, one and his kindred against the other’. Even so, every year, many of those wild men are ‘brought . . . into the gaol of Newcastle, and at the assizes are condemned and hanged, sometimes twenty or thirty’.
The enduring image of the Tarras Moss battle is not the fictitious English cow or the log cabins by the Liddel but the spectacle of a thousand Scottish and English soldiers under one leader swarming over the moor below Tinnis Hill. An English warden with the backing of a Scottish king rode against a rebel clan which recognized neither one country nor the other. ‘Administrative centralization’ may not be words to stir the blood like ‘the false Salkeld’ or ‘the keen Lord Scroop’, but this was the true nemesis of the reivers.
On 11 July 1603, two years after the siege of Tarras Moss and two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Union of t
he Crowns was proclaimed by King James, henceforth to be titled king of ‘Great Britain’. The two nations had become a kingdom with ‘but one common limit or rather guard of the Ocean sea, making the whole a little world within itself’, with one language and one religion. Only now, with the abolition of its last remaining land border, could that kingdom be properly described, as it had been in Shakespeare’s Richard II – a play recently staged in London by supporters of James VI – as a ‘little world’, a ‘fortress built by nature for herself’, a ‘precious stone, set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall, / Or as a moat defensive to a house’.
The border counties became the Middle Shires – ‘the Navell or Umbilick of both Kingdomes’ – and the office of warden was abolished, if only in name. Border strongholds were to be dismantled (a difficult order, only partly carried out). All feuds would cease and the only horses permitted, apart from those of gentlemen, would be ‘mean nags’ for tilling fields. The borderers were to ‘put away all armour and weapons, as well offensive as defensive, as jacks, spears, lances, swords, daggers, steelcaps, hagbuts, pistols, plate sleeves, and such like’. Sleuth hounds or ‘slough dogs’ – a speciality of the Borders – were to be kept at certain places, including Sarkfoot and Moat, for pursuing offenders through the otherwise impassable bogs and mosses.36
Four years later, when James addressed Parliament, the ‘one nation’ dream was still blossoming in his mind as it withered in reality. The sun of righteousness had risen and warmed the fertile lands between the Cheviots and the Solway:
