THE BORDER REIVERS

Those who live in the north of England know only too well who the Border Reivers were! They inhabited  the counties that glare at each other across the English-Scottish Border: Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham; Berwickshire, Roxburghshire and Dumfriesshire.

The Pennines form the backbone of the Durham Dales and proved a barrier, though the Eden Valley provided an easy route to rich pickings. Every northerner knows the story of the monks at Blanchland in County Durham who cowered in their church as the Scots raiders passed by on their way home to Scotland. Relieved, they rang the bells in thanks. The Scots heard the bells, turned back and raided the little village hidden in its deep valley.

George MacDonald Fraser described the reivers in his book The Steel Bonnets: “not the most immediately lovable folk in the United Kingdom. Incomers may find them difficult to know; there is a tendency among them to be suspicious and taciturn, and the harsh Border voice, whether the accent is Scots or English, lends itself readily to derision and complaint. No doubt there are Cumbrians who are gay, frivolous folk, and Roxburghshire probably has its quota of fawning, polished sophisticates; they are in a minority, that is all.”

Qualities such as those he described were forged in harsh times which passed by most of Britain. From the late thirteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, the Borders were frequently a war zone. During those times armies marched in both directions across the Border lands, burning, stealing and despoiling as they went, for armies must eat, and the people of the Borders bore the brunt of it.

When the army seized a man’s crops and livestock, there was nothing he could do to support himself and his family but relieve his neighbours of the goods he needed. If the neighbour was in the same situation, then they joined forces and foraged further afield. Nationality was not a consideration in such desperate times; Scot raided Scot as readily as they robbed the English, and the English were not averse to raiding an English farm if needs must. Scots helped the English raid north of the Border and Englishmen aided Scots raids south of the Border. Families such as the Grahams had members straddling both sides of the line and no one ever knew for certain which side they would support on any given day.

In times of peace, the raiding went on. Habits once formed, died hard. Feuds developed, some across the Border divide and some within it. The Maxwells feuded with the Johnstones in one of the bitterest and bloody battles known in Scotland, yet now no one knows how or why it began; possibly a power struggle for supremacy between two powerful tribes that turned the Debateable Land into a wasteland according to Lord Dacre in 1528. Twenty years later Lord Wharton was busily fanning the flames to secure England’s interests and both clan leaders found themselves in and out of English prisons on an almost regular basis.

National policy tried to stop the lawlessness. The Borders were divided into six administrative areas known as the Marches and England and Scotland each appointed three March Wardens whose task was to defend against invasion in time of war and put down crime and maintain law and order in peace time. Some were good men and others were the worst raiders of the frontier. A Warden often used one reiving family to help them catch another. Tracking thieves on horseback in the dark across trackless and boggy wastes was not an easy task and no Borderer was about to betray another Borderer unless it brought him profit or it played into his feud.

Sex took no notice of national policy and intermarriages across the Border were common. Cattle rustling and protection rackets abounded. The words blackmail and kidnapping came into the English language via the Borderers. Overpopulation of the more fertile dales and greedy landlords contributed to the problems. The Tynedale custom of dividing a deceased man’s land among all his sons resulted in a situation “whereby beggars increase and service decays.”

Homes all over the Border were makeshift things in many cases. Often burned down, they were rebuilt astonishingly quickly out of clay and stones, sometimes turf sods with roofs of thatch. Larger villages had more substantial dwellings of stone and oak timbers. The Bastle was smaller, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastle_house) built on the same lines as a peel tower, which was more secure still; built of stone with massively thick walls. There was only one entrance at ground level, with two doors, one a yett – an iron grating - and the other of oak reinforced with iron. A narrow curving stair known as a turnpike led to upper floors. Usually they curved clockwise so a defender retreating to an upper storey had his unguarded left side to the wall; the man attacking up the stair was at a disadvantage with his sword arm to the wall. The Kerrs, notoriously left-handed, built their turnpikes anti-clockwise. http://www.peelcastle.co.uk/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smailholm_Tower

The standard of living was generally higher in towns such as Berwick or Carlisle, but the daily food ration of a soldier in the Berwick garrison in 1597 would not satisfy us today; he received a daily ration of a 12 oz loaf, 3 pints of beer, 1½ lbs of beef, ¾lb of cheese and ¼lb of butter. If that was what the English army lived on, consider the diet of peasant farmers whose crops have been trampled into the mud by an army passing through.

The people of the Border have not changed much in four hundred years; the Descendants of the Elliots, Armstrongs and Fenwicks, Bells and Nixons, Scotts, Maxwells and Kerrs are still living roughly where they were in the sixteenth century. It is not exaggerating to say that they form a distinct cultural and social bloc that is different from the rest of the British people.

There are poems, songs and tales told about the famous names that have come down through the years. The names alone give a flavour of the times: Kinmont Willie, Black Ormiston, Hobbie Noble, Fingerless Will, Nebless Clem, Willie Kang, Bangtail, Fire the Braes.