The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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       VI

       Food and shelter

The tribal system, and the eternal turbulence of the frontier, dictated the day-to-day living of the people. Camden spoke of nomads; as such, the Borderers tended to live on mobile beasts rather than on standing crops. They ate beef and broth in quantity, and some mutton: “they live chiefly on flesh, milk and boiled barley”, says Leslie, while Sylvius gives a diet of fish and flesh, with bread only as a dainty. Pedro de Ayala mentions immense flocks of sheep¹ in the wilder parts, and the lack of crop cultivation.

Leslie noted that not only was use of bread very limited, but that the Borderers took very little beer² or wine. Indeed, they seem to have been abstemious enough, although according to a document giving the number of taverns in the English Border in 1571, the inhabitants of the Middle March must have had a pub for every 46 people or thereabouts, and Berwick the same proportion. But drunkenness is seldom mentioned in Border records, with such notable exceptions as the six Scots reivers whom John Carey captured drunk at an inn, and Sir John Forster’s bastard son and deputy, “wan that is so given over to drunkennes, that if he cannot get companey, he will sit in a chayre in his chamber and drinke himself drunke before he reise!”

Leslie was talking about the rural Borderers when he mentioned the absence of bread, which was commoner in the cities, larger houses, and garrisons.³ An English traveller who stayed in the home of a Border knight in 1598 (it may have been Branxholm, the hold of Buccleuch), observed that “they commonly eat hearth cakes of oats” (the cakes or cracknels of which Froissart talks), and although he was entertained “after their best manner” he found “no art of cookery or household stuff, but rude neglect of both”. His account of a meal-time in the hold of a Border chieftain is so detailed that it is worth quoting at greater length:

      “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. The Scots, living then in factions, used to keep many followers and so consumed their revenues in victuals, and were always in want of money.”

      However, he found them hospitable to strangers, the city folk entertaining “passengers on acquaintance”.

      The agricultural system of the Borderers, peaceful and lawless alike, followed a regular pattern. From autumn to spring, when the nights were long, was the season for raiding; the summer months were for husbandry, and although raiding occurred then also, it was less systematic. Tillage took place in spring and summer, and the crops were mainly oats, rye, and barley, but the main effort went into cattle and sheep raising. For this the rural Borderer had to be mobile, leaving his winter dwelling about April to move into the “hielands” where he lived in his sheiling for the next four or five months while the cattle pastured.

      Although the sheiling communities were safer than the winter quarters, they were not immune from the reivers. Their inaccessibility cut both ways, for if it made raiding more difficult it also placed the herdsmen farther from the protection of the Warden forces. Eure wrote to Burghley at the start of the 1597 summering to complain that he could not defend the Middle March sheilings “without I have 100 foot from Berwick to lie during the summer with them for defence.” In that season at least the Scots were hitting the sheilings harder than usual, so that Eure found his people were reluctant to venture out summering, “which is their chiefest profitt”.

      Following this system of transhumance was easier for people who were not accustomed to build houses for permanence, and who had learned from generations of warfare and raiding to live on the hoof. Even their winter quarters were often makeshift affairs that could be put up in a matter of hours. They were fashioned of clay, or of stones when they were available, and sometimes of turf sods, with roofs of thatch or turf. Most of the isolated holdings would be of this type, “huts and cottages” as Leslie says, “about the burning of which they are nowise concerned”. It was easy enough to build another, and Sir Robert Bowes described in 1546 how “if such cottages or cabins where they dwell in be bront of one day they will the next day maik other and not remove from the ground”.

      In the larger villages there was more effort at permanence, with sturdy stone houses and walls, and in Tynedale and on the Scottish side there were some “very stronge houses” constructed of massive baulks of oak bound hard together and “so thycke mortressed that yt wilbe very harde, without greatt force and lasoure, to break or caste [them] downe”. By lining the walls and roofs thickly with turf the builders went some way towards fire-proofing these block-houses; Ill Will Armstrong’s house in the Scottish West March was “buylded after siche a maner that it couth not be brynt ne distroyed, unto it was cut downe with axes”.

      The next stage up from the wooden block-house was the peel tower, many of which can still be seen all over the Border. An excellent example is Smailholm, near Kelso, or Hollows Tower on the Esk, which are rather de luxe models, but show exactly the purpose which the peel tower served.

The peel was built of stone, with walls of massive thickness, and ideally was three or four storeys high. The only entrance was through a double door at ground level, one of СКАЧАТЬ