The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ of their lives as agriculture. It follows that they were unusual folk, and that the stamp of the old days is on them still. If the Borderer is closer and tougher and dourer than his fellow-countrymen, it is because he is the descendant of men and women who lived by and in the shadow of raid and theft and bloody murder.

      How the frontier society was born and grew, how Border raiding became a systematic thing, how the two governments tried to deal with it, how it fitted into the politics and diplomacy of the two realms and into the social life of the area, and how, almost suddenly, it passed away, is the theme of this book. Some of the stories have been told before, not always accurately; immense scholarship has been applied to various aspects of the subject, and I don’t wish simply to re-tell old tales, or to presume to improve on the researches of eminent historians. But it has seemed to me, knowing something of the Border and its literature, romantic and factual, that the reivers themselves have never been given a history, and that there are still points to be made, and stories to be told, perhaps in a rather different way.

      There is a school of Border writers who may be called the romantics. The first of these is the greatest man the region ever produced, Sir Walter Scott. It is not too much to say that Scott made the legendary Border as most people vaguely understand it; a land of brave men and daring deeds, of gothic mystery and fairytale beauty, of gallant Scot and sturdy Saxon, of high ideals and sweet dreams clothed in ballads that are the very heart of a nation’s poetry. All perfectly true, in its way, but not the whole story. Scott knew the other side as well, the blood and the terror and the cruelty and the crime. He, after all, understood the Borderland as probably no one else has ever done, and no other writer or scholar has done anything like as much to rescue its real history from the past. But he was a professional romantic; it was not his job to view his subject as it snarled at him over the business end of a Liddesdale lance; there were no Whartons or Scropes descending on Abbotsford by night to ransack and burn it.

      One concludes that most of the romantic writers on the subject had never seen a sword or axe wielded in earnest, or seen a hanging, or a thatch burned in anger, or wakened in terror to the sound of hoof-beats. That was not their fault; but if they had known these things, a little of their enthusiasm for the glamorous side of the Border story might have been modified. Nor is patriotism, a common resort of the apologist, of much use in this context; patriotism was, as will be seen, frequently well down the scale of the Borderer’s priorities.

      So, while admitting that it is difficult not to see the romantic side, it is important to keep it in perspective.

      At the other extreme from the romantics are the historical specialists, who have dealt with various parts of the Border question—international politics, administration, military history, genealogical research, and a host of much smaller topics which have been examined in minute detail. These matters have been exhaustively done, but, quite rightly, they have not usually been concerned with what is called human interest. The Scottish policy of Henry VIII is a fascinating thing, offering as rich a field to the psychiatrist as to the historian, but I am less concerned with the effect that it had on, say, Franco-Scottish relations than with the more immediate and dramatic impact which it had on the good wife of Kirkcudbright who, during a skirmish near her home, actually delivered her husband up to the enemy for safe-keeping. Obviously one must take account of the machinations of Walsingham and James VI and I, but the prime consideration for me is how Nebless Clem Croser went about his business of cattle-rustling, and how the Grahams came to dispossess the Storeys, and how old Sir John Forster’s wife got the door shut in the nick of time as a band of reivers came up the stair.

      It is necessary, I feel, to try to understand the Border reivers, and if not to excuse what they did, at least to see why they did it. And among all this, to try to see what it must have been like to be a wife or a mother making a home on the Marches.

      At the beginning, it is as well to make one or two general points which are perhaps not commonly known. One should dispose immediately of the notion that Border raiding in peace, or even in war-time, was a straight case of England v. Scotland. It wasn’t. Raiding went both up and down and sideways. It has been common to show the English as the cops and the Scots as the robbers, but this was not the case. At this time of day no one can say who stole most from where, or who wreaked the greatest havoc; one might take a daring stab and say that probably the southern Scottish counties suffered the greater devastation, on a wide scale, as a result of English activity, including war-time inroads which cannot be classed as reiving proper—although the reiver and the soldier were often indistinguishable in war. On the other hand, the number of regular reiving forays by smaller groups was certainly greater from Scotland into England than vice versa. The net result over the centuries was probably not very different.

      The important point is that it was not a one-way traffic, or even a two-way one. Scot pillaged Scot and Englishman robbed Englishman just as readily as they both raided across the frontier; feuds were just as deadly between families on the same side of the Border as they were when the frontier lay between them; Scots helped English raiders to harry north of the line, and Englishmen aided and abetted Scottish inroads. The families themselves often belonged to both sides—there were English Grahams and Scottish Grahams, for example (and no family ever made better use of dual nationality). Add to this the fairly obvious fact that sex attraction is immeasurably stronger than national policy, and the picture becomes more complex still. In spite of official opinion and even prohibition, inter-marriage took place, at least in some areas, to such a degree that one English surveyor made a point of noting particularly those Scots who did not have English family ties.

      Consider also the perpetual petty jealousies, the conflict of national, family, and personal interest, the great criss-cross of vendetta and alliance, of feudal loyalty and blood tie, the repeated changing of sides and allegiances, and the general confusion bordering on chaos, and one sees that the traditional Anglo-Scottish antipathy, while it was ever-present and mattered considerably, will simply not do as an inviolable rule when one looks closely into Border reiving. National difference was at the root of the business, but it was frequently lost among the running cattle and the fell-side skirmishing.

      This was what made the failure of law and order inevitable, so long as Britain was divided into two separate states. While one country could be played off against the other, while the frontier could be used as the safety line in a massive game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and while the line was crossed by all the tangled threads of blood kinship, marriage, and personal and professional alliance, the reiver system presented an insoluble problem. The international Border law, operated by the Wardens of the Marches and other Border officers, could and did sometimes work surprisingly well, but it was at best a finger in the dyke.

      All in all, it is not a pretty story, but in its small way it is essential to what T. H. White called the matter of Britain. The British, and their kinsmen in America and the Commonwealth, count themselves civilised, and conceive of their savage ancestors as being buried in the remote past The past is sometimes quite close; these ancestors of Presidents Nixon and Johnson, of Billy Graham and T. S. Eliot, of Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the first man on the moon, are not many generations away.

      Lastly, I should explain the plan of the book. The story of the reivers is not one that can conveniently be told in strict chronological order, so I have split it into five parts.

      Part I is a brief historical sketch up to 1500, to show how the sixteenth-century Borderland was created.

      Part II describes what the Border was like in that century, what manner of people lived there, who were the leading robber families, how they lived and ate and dressed and built their homes, what games they played, what songs they sang, and so forth, so that the background of the story can be understood.

      Part III describes the reivers and how they rode their raids, the skills and tactics they used, how they conducted their feuds, and how they practised such crimes as blackmail, kidnapping, and terrorism. It also explains how Border law operated under the March Wardens, how the two governments tried СКАЧАТЬ