The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ The moving boundaries

      After the Romans came the deluge. It was the time of the barbarians, whose frontiers moved with them. Once the Wall had been overrun, it ceased to matter for the time being, which was the best part of a thousand years. In that time the frontiers of middle Britain came and went as forgotten kingdoms were made and unmade. From the west came the Scots, into the long sea-lochs and mountains of Argyll; from the east the great tide of Angles, and the kingdom of Northumbria spread north across the Wall-line as far as the Forth; westward of it ran the land of Strathclyde of the Britons; in the highland north the Picts lived, and fought it out with the Scots until they were absorbed.

      Norse and Danish rovers from the cold seas over Britain came to Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles, to the Northumbrian seaboard and Strathclyde; they were a strong strain whose names and faces endure across the Border country. And another influence arrived, but without force of arms; a turbulent, fearless Irish priest, Columba, and a Briton named Ninian brought the benefits of Christianity to Scotland, and south of the Wall the quiet Aidan and the shepherd, Cuthbert, spread the gospel in Northern England, not without controversy; before serious Anglo-Scottish political differences began, there was a north – south dispute over the manner in which priestly heads should be shaved.

      Very gradually, out of the changing fortunes of races and kingdoms, a pattern began to emerge. English kings loosened the hold of the sea-rover people, and what may be seen as the prototype of an English-Scottish struggle took place when in the tenth century Athelstan of England fought a great and successful battle against a combined force of Scots, Norsemen, and Britons; the site of the battle is lost, but one theory is that it was fought by the flat-topped mountain called Birnswark, over the Solway.

      England was slowly emerging as a nation, and although the name was still uncoined, Scotland was being born north of the Cheviot Hills. The line was coming back to something not far away from the boundary that Hadrian had drawn, across the narrow waist of Britain. In the eleventh century the mould was beginning to set; Scotland had her first great king, that Malcolm Canmore who in Shakespeare’s version has bored and bewildered generations of school children with his self-examination, but who in fact did kill Macbeth and established himself firmly on the Scottish throne.

      Equally importantly, perhaps, he married, a princess of the English house of Alfred. She was a pious, thoroughly determined lady, and she seems to have inspired something like awe in the great rough fighting chief she married. In her influence on him, and on her adopted country, she was one of the most important women in Scottish history; through her, much that was English was imported, and remained with lasting effect on southern Scotland.

      But the vital event of Malcolm’s reign took place far outside Scotland: in 1066 William of Normandy conquered England. In settling his kingdom he dealt ruthlessly with its northern areas, making a scorched desert from York to Durham, and floods of refugees poured over into Scotland; among them was the Princess Margaret who Malcolm of Scotland married. William was a thorough king, and as hardy a ruffian as Canmore himself; when Malcolm gave asylum to the refugees, and took up arms on their behalf, the Conqueror marched into Scotland in 1072, confronted Malcolm, made peace with him, and obtained his submission.

      The last three words demand some explanation. Scottish kings had reached agreements with English rulers before; submission had been made, homage paid, and forms of superiority acknowledged. After Birnswark, Constantine of Scotland had become the vassal of Athelstan. But exactly what such agreements implied we cannot say; it is doubtful if the consenting parties could have said, either. Forms might be agreed publicly, but private interpretations would obviously vary. In later years, when Scottish kings were also English titled land-owners, the matter of vassalage had a real meaning, at least so far as their English possessions were concerned, and if an English king chose to understand vassalage in a wider sense, he was simply exploiting the situation to his own advantage, but without good moral ground.

      Out of the historic tangle, there certainly emerged among English kings a belief that they had, traditionally, some kind of superiority over the Scottish king, and no doubt a feeling that for the sake of political security and unity—one might say almost of tidiness—it would be better if Scotland were under English control, or at best, added to England. This attitude can be charitably seen as politically realistic, or at the other extreme, as megalomaniac; it is all in the point of view.

      Canmore made his submission, then, for what it was worth, but before long he was harrying in England again. In his earlier inroads he had done fearful damage, and carried off so many prisoners that “for a long time after, scarce a little house in Scotland was to be found without English slaves”, which no doubt helped the process of Anglicisation in southern Scotland. Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.

      By then the Conqueror was dead, but his energetic successor, Rufus, was an equally powerful influence in the making of the Border. It was he who had finally taken Carlisle from the Scots in 1092, settled an English colony, and rebuilt the city which had long lain in ruins, adding to it the castle which was the parent of the present fortress, and which complemented the “New Castle” which his father had built on the eastern seaboard. In addition Rufus helped Edgar, Canmore’s son, to recover the Scottish throne, which had been in dispute after Canmore’s death.

      And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years. It began when, following Rufus, Henry I married Malcolm Canmore’s daughter; the close blood tie between the rulers, England’s preoccupation with the Continent, and the absence of any major Anglo-Scottish difference, all helped to keep the peace.

      In this quiet time the independent state of Scotland was finally made. The three sons of Canmore and Margaret—Edgar, Alexander, and David—shaped it in the decisive half century from 1100 to 1150. They were friends of England’s, and they helped to fashion their kingdom in England’s likeness; at the same time, England was content to leave the Scots alone.

      Like their mother, the three sons were godly folk, and under them the great religious houses rose and flourished, in the Borders as much as elsewhere. They saw that organised religion was a prime instrument of political stability, and used it; they also encouraged what has been called the Norman invasion of Scotland. By promoting Norman settlement, they introduced another civilising influence in the shape of the Norman gentleman-adventurer loyal to the monarch and capable of keeping order in the area he was given to rule. Gradually the feudal system was introduced into Scotland, but although Normans were settled extensively in the Border area, the new system never entirely displaced the old pattern of clanship and family chieftainship. This never died; Border, like Highland blood, was a lot thicker than charters, and the traditional tribal loyalties endured up to and beyond the union of the crowns. Its importance in the Border country cannot be over-rated.

      Under the three kings there emerged a southern Scotland very like the England over the Border. The language was the same, as were the habits and customs and systems of government; the frontier was perhaps less of a barrier then than at any other time in British history. The day was dawning which later centuries were to look back on as Scotland’s golden age. For the Borderers, on either side, it was a time when they began to forget the horrors that war had once unleashed on them from beyond the line; when the peasant in Teviotdale and Berwickshire, in Tynedale or among the Cumbrian fells, could go to sleep secure.

      Not that the temple of Janus was permanently closed; on three notable occasions the armies were busy across the Marches, and there was blood and fire from the Solway to the Tyne. But three wars in a century and a half, between England and Scotland when they were still in a semi-civilised condition, is not bad going; it was tranquillity itself compared with what was to come.

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