The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ difficult to judge at this distance, but again a study of the records makes one cautious about accepting blanket statements. Hector of Harlaw, the Carleton brothers, Black Ormiston, and Richie Graham will be mentioned later; their behaviour provides food for thought on the subject.

      Leslie is interesting on Border morality as applied to property and theft. “They have a persuasion that all property is common by the law of nature, and is therefore liable to be appropriated by them in their necessity.” Later he adds: “Besides, they think the art of plundering so very lawful, that they never say over their prayers more fervently, or have more devout recurrence to their beads and their rosaries, than when they have made an expedition.”

      Sometimes one gets the impression that the good bishop secretly admired the Border reivers. At least he is careful to do them justice, and there may be a clue to his attitude in that passage where he notes approvingly: “Nor indeed have the Borderers, with such ready frenzy as many others of the country, joined the heretical secession from the common faith of the holy church.” Rascals they might be, but Leslie counted them among his flock. Possibly he had not heard the story of the visitor to Liddesdale who, finding no churches, demanded: “Are there no Christians here?” and received the reply, “Na, we’s a’ Elliots and Armstrangs.”

      Apart from the spiritual side, we know some other things about the old Border character. One has to remember, in quoting travellers’ stories, that most of those who visited Scotland, for example, wrote of the country as a whole, and what they described may not hold good for the Marches. But Pope Pius II, who visited the country in his earlier years when he was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, made observations which are pertinent; he noted the generally poor condition of the country, and that the men were small, bold and forward in temper, while the women, “fair in complexion, comely and pleasing” were “not distinguished for their chastity, giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands”.

      This was in the fifteenth century; fifty years later Pedro de Ayala, a Spaniard, found the women “courteous in the extreme … really honest, though very bold”. He thought they dressed better than English women, and were in absolute control of their houses.

      Several writers testify to a boastful tendency in the Scots, and Sylvius noted that nothing pleased them more than to hear the English abused. An English physician who lived in Scotland in the 1540s found that it was not in nature for a Scot to love an Englishman, and we have plenty of evidence of mutual loathing on either side. John Carey thought the Scots “the most perverst and prowde nacion in the world”, and paid them a back-handed compliment: whoever found himself up against them, the Scots were “such a people as will soon find what is in him.”

Eure,⁹ an English Warden, said of his own Marchmen that they “envied the stranger”; outsiders were not welcomed on either side of the line, as many of the later English Wardens, who were not Borderers, found to their cost. But one learns to be cautious about accepting some of the English officials’ strictures on the Borderers at their full face value; they were doubtless sincere, but they were under severe pressures in their office, and in writing to London they tended to give full vent to their feelings. One detects a fine rising note of hysteria in John Carey’s correspondence, and in that of Eure, who never found his feet as a Warden. Henry Leigh, a lesser official, once observed, with feeling, that the Borderers “were no cripples of their tongues”; neither were their Wardens.

A marked characteristic of the Marchmen, seemingly at odds with Anglo-Scottish rivalry, was their peculiar sense of community which made the Borderland an entity. Over and above inter-marriage and blood kinship, there was a common heritage that seemed to unite English and Scot on the Border against the outside world; they under stood each other and, to use a modern cliché, shared common problems. C. P. Snow touched in one of his novels on the phenomenon of two enemies who felt somehow closer to each other than to their own supporters, and this was true of the Border people. At its extreme this feeling manifested itself in one English invasion, when English and Scottish Borderers, on opposite sides as part of their national armies, were seen talking to each other “within less than a spear’s length, but when aware that such intercourse was noticed, they commenced to run at each other, apparently with no desire to inflict serious injury.”¹⁰

      Often to English Wardens it seemed that their subjects were more at home with Scottish Borderers than with other Englishmen—usually for profit. The bond, created by geography, by common social conditions, and by a shared spirit of lawless independence, was a paradox that intermarriage strengthened. It has never entirely disappeared.

      The tribal system, sometimes called clanship, also helped to foster it. Family unity as much as anything made the Borders and set them apart. Despite the feudal system, tribal loyalty was paramount; Scott noted that no matter what the family’s origin, Saxon, Norman, or Celtic, clanship persisted and was too strong for the government. “No Prince but a Percy” was a Northumberland saying, and on the English side the power of the local chieftain was a continuing matter of concern to London, especially when the Catholic North became a menace to the Reformed state. On both sides the chief of the tribe was the man who mattered; in England “the inhabitants acted less under the direction of their landlords than under that of the principal man of their name”. In Scotland clanship was recognised by a government that could do nothing about it anyway; the chiefs were to find pledges for keeping good order by the clan, just as landlords had to take responsibility for their tenants.

      There is a tendency to think of clanship as a peculiarly Scottish thing, but it is evident that on the Border the tie of tribal blood was no stronger among the Kerrs and Scotts and Armstrongs of Scotland than among the Forsters, Ogles, Fenwicks, Charltons, Halls, and Musgraves of England.

      And if it was not easy to be a chief or a landlord over such people, it was even harder to be a central government whose claims to loyalty and obedience were feeble by comparison. What member of the Scott family needed Edinburgh’s protection—or approval—when he had Buccleuch’s?

      No doubt the clan system contributed to the poverty and economic decline of the Borders, as well as to their backwardness. Greedy overlords were a cause of decay, and so was overpopulation of the dales, which drove men out to steal. Poverty has perhaps been over-emphasised as a root cause of Border reiving, but it was certainly a spur. The oft-quoted phenomenon of Tynedale, where a deceased’s land must be divided equally among all his sons, “whereby beggars increase and service decays” was rightly a matter for reform in Eure’s eyes.

1. The Last Years of a Frontier, pp. 26–8.

2. Thomas Howard the younger (1474?–1554), Earl of Surrey and later Duke of Norfolk (1524). Fought in Spain, 1512; Lord High Admiral of England, 1513–25; Earl Marshal of England, 1533. An experienced Border fighter, he suppressed the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. Uncle of Anne Boleyn.

3. Sir Robert Carey (1560–1639), was at different times Warden of the English East and Middle Marches, and also served in a subordinate capacity in the West March. Clever, brave, and something of a beau sabreur, he is one of the few Borderers to have left memoirs of his activities.

4. Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612), third son of Lord Burghley, was Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State from 1596, although in effect he had been holding the post for some years before that. He worked hard to secure the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Created Earl of Salisbury, 1605.

5. Sir СКАЧАТЬ