The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ