The Debatable Land Read online

  Early in 1528, behaving increasingly like the king of his own country, William Dacre declared war on the tribe of Armstrongs. He assembled two thousand soldiers ‘in secret’ (which, as he shortly discovered, was impossible) and marched on the new pele tower at Holehouse (Hollows) on the Esk. Dacre’s description makes it clear that this was one of the early ‘log cabin’ models rather than the stone tower which can be seen there today.17 This monstrous, pyramidal protuberance of oak and clay was the home of Johnnie Armstrong, a ‘broken’ man with no allegiance to a clan chief. ‘Black Jock’, as he came to be known, practised a perverted form of blackmail, extorting money from farmers who lived far to the east whom he had neither the means nor the intention of protecting.

  When William Dacre led his men across the Esk to Hollows, he found a small army of reivers waiting for him. Observing that a house of oak in a slippery ‘hole’ above a violent river was hard to approach with ‘a great host’, he retreated to Carlisle and returned with artillery and axemen. This time, in the unexpected absence of defenders, he managed to annihilate it. Rich Grame, who was reported to have tipped off the Armstrong mob, was shackled and locked up in Carlisle Castle. Dacre was able to report to Wolsey that the Debatable Land had been ‘burnt and destroyed; and [I] shall not faill, God willing, soo too procede from tyme to tyme, until it be clerly waiste, without one house or holde standing within it’.

  The attack on Hollows Tower would have been a complete success were it not for the fact that, while Dacre was blowing it up and hewing it down, its inhabitants were hard at work elsewhere. Eighteen miles to the east, a mill in Gilsland which belonged to the Dacre family was burned to ashes. Then a mass attack was launched on the English side of the Esk. It led to the loss of sixty-one houses and eighty-six cattle all the way from Arthuret to Netherby. Worst of all from Dacre’s point of view, the traitorous Rich Grame, having been allowed for some reason ‘to go loose up and down [Carlisle] castle’, had found his way to ‘a privy postern which stood open to the fields’ where a rider was waiting with a spare horse.

  An exhausted Dacre then left to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury. The result of his father’s policy of funding reivers was chaos. He was left with the job of trying to exterminate the war dogs his father had fed. The once peaceful Debatable Land had been turned into a belligerent enclave between the two nations.

  While Dacre was away on pilgrimage, a letter reached him from his wife and ‘loveynge bedfello’, Elizabeth. The daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury had a firmer grasp of local geography and politics than the menfolk. She told her husband that there were now Armstrongs, Irwins, Routledges, Grahams and Storeys living along the Esk, the Mere Burn on the eastern boundary of the Debatable Land and the fringes of the Solway Moss. She also enclosed a letter from the Scottish warden, Robert Maxwell, ‘showing his crafty mind’. Acting on a dubious tip, William’s uncle Christopher, the deputy warden, had set off in pursuit of some Routledges, who were allies of the Armstrongs. The Routledges had galloped off towards the head of Tarras Water, ‘which is the uttermost part of all the said Debateable Ground’, and disappeared thanks to ‘the great strength of the woods and mosses’. Unable to take any prisoners, Christopher Dacre had had to content himself with the usual spoils – eighty cows, a hundred sheep and forty goats. On the way home, he had torched the houses illegally erected by the sons of Black Jock Armstrong.

  Black Jock was finally disposed of in June 1530, not by Dacre, but by the seventeen-year-old king of Scotland, James V, who combined a hunting expedition to the Ettrick Forest with a purge of the Borders. Armstrong was hanged along with several of his accomplices for ‘common theft and reset of theft’ (receiving stolen goods).

  History – especially Borders history – is not always written by the victors. The famous ballad of Johnnie Armstrong and his ‘gallant cumpanie’, which I have heard mentioned and even recited as the authentic cri de cœur of a heroic Scottish borderer, was quite obviously composed by someone who had never paid protection money to Black Jock or seen his wife and children burned to death under their own roof. It is hard to imagine the illiterate Johnnie Armstrong bidding a fond farewell to the charmless hulk of oak in which he plotted his smash-and-grab excursions: ‘Farewell! My bonny Gilnock hall, / Where on Esk side thou standest stout!’ It is just as hard to imagine jolly Black Jock as a proto-nationalist who, according to the ballad that was tidied up or half-composed by Walter Scott, aspired only to save his ‘country deir frae Englishmen!’

  One Scotsman in particular was glad to see him gone. A month later, the Scottish warden of the West March, Robert Maxwell, a glorified reiver with a government salary, was granted all of Johnnie Armstrong’s possessions, ‘movable and immovable’ – including whatever remained of the tower, which he claimed belonged to ‘the lordship of Eskdale’. Dacre was incensed: ‘the Holehouse . . . is no part of the said lordship of Eskdale, but a parcell of the Debatable grounde, as may be evidently proveyd’. He had, therefore, been perfectly entitled to wipe it from the face of the earth.

  17

  ‘Rube, Burne, Spoyll, Slaye, Murder annd Destrewe’

  For most of the 1530s, a bloody truce prevailed, each side accusing the other of failing to destroy its own future share of the territory. Apart from executing reivers, the two governments had three options: laying waste to the Debatable Land at regular intervals, bestowing land and titles on the leading reivers in the hope that their pele towers would serve as privately funded forts, or dividing the Debatable Land between Scotland and England.

  Destroying people’s homes and livelihoods had certain disadvantages: it encouraged the reivers to go reiving in order to restock their barmkins, and it tended to provoke revenge attacks on wardens’ property. In 1537, a cheaper version of the idea was proposed by the Scots and enshrined in law. (The same law was passed again in 1551, which was quite normal, since proclamations were usually ignored.) The idea, familiar to readers of Caesar’s Gallic War, was to farm out the labour of destruction to criminal bands who would, in theory, massacre one another like bears and bulldogs in a pit.

  . . . all Inglichemene annde Scottesmene, after thys proclamatione mayde, er and shalbe fre to rube, burne, spoyll, slaye, murder annd destrewe, all annd every suche person or persons, ther bodys, heldynges, goodes annd cattalles, as dothe remayne or shall inhabyde upon any partt of the sayde Debatable lannde, witheowtt any redresse to be mayde for the sayme, exceptt for bytt off mowthe betwene son annd son, as anceannt use annd custome haythe beyne to all otheres Inglichmene annd Scottesmene thatt inhabyttes nott ther witheowtt a stobe or stayke.18

  It was stated in addition that if anyone brought to a warden of either country ‘the hede or bodye, deyde or qwyke’ (dead or alive) of an interloper he ‘shall have goode rewardes for the sayme’.

  The practice of exploiting local conflicts to clear the ground prior to colonization – either by making social life impossible or by enabling one friendly or easily defeated group to prevail – has a long and hideous history. In the case of the Debatable Land, it had some moderate success. The following Christmas, Thomas Wharton, deputy warden of the West March, reported to Thomas Cromwell that ‘the West Marches of England, Scotland and Liddesdale were never so quiet’. In 1542, no more than twenty or thirty men were living in the Debatable Land. But by then, the official cross-border raids were taking on a different character.

  *

  That year, the cruellest and best-equipped bully ever to ravage the borderlands launched a ruthless campaign against the Scots. Henry VIII sent an army from Berwick across the eastern border into Scotland. As ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’, he was supposedly trying to persuade his nephew James V to break with the Roman Church. Eight days later, the English went home after incinerating twenty-one towns and villages, including Kelso and its abbey.

  The Scots retaliated on 24 November. While the Scottish army moved south towards Arthuret, King James watched from his vantage point on the table-top summit of
Burnswark Hill. At that distance, he might just have been able to see the smoke pouring from the ruined towers of the Grahams of Netherby, but he was probably spared the sight of his soldiers getting bogged down in the boot-sucking mire between the Esk and the Solway Moss.

  The defeat of the Scottish army at the Battle of Solway Moss in 1542 belongs to the history of the Debatable Land as well as to that of Anglo-Scottish rivalry, but it introduces a confusion which has often been dispelled by omitting the Border reivers from the serious business of national history or by admitting them only as lawless savages from a bygone age.

  There were now three coexisting conflicts: England against Scotland, both nations against the Debatable Land, and the reivers against each other. By far the most destructive began with a full invasion of Scotland by Henry VIII. Two weeks after the Battle of Solway Moss and six days before his death, a child was born to James V. Having decided that the infant Mary Stuart should be betrothed to his son Edward, Henry put his case as forcefully as he knew how. He ordered his commander to turn Edinburgh into a lasting memorial to ‘the vengeance of God’. He was to ‘sack’, ‘rase’ and ‘deface’ not only the capital but also ‘as many townes and villages about Edinborough as ye may conveniently’, in particular, the port of Leith: ‘burn and subvert it and all the rest, putting man, woman and child to fyre and sworde without exception, where any resistance shall be made agaynst you’. The campaign lasted seven years, and because the ostensible aim was to win the hand of a baby girl, it came to be known much later by the coy and slightly creepy name of ‘the Rough Wooing’.

  While Henry turned the Borders into a wasteland, the wardens of Scotland and England continued to treat the Debatable Land as a cancerous growth. English troops set fire to the woods so that cavalry could pass unimpeded, while the Scots used French mercenaries for ‘the douncasting of certane houssis upoun the debatable lande’.

  The national and local conflicts are sometimes hard to tell apart. At the Battle of Solway Moss, both armies were led by Border wardens acting as agents of the state but with a keen eye to their own property, present and future. The situation is further confused by the opportunistic alliances of reiver warlords with one side or the other and by the English reports of raids and ‘damages done to the Scots’. These are easily mistaken for records of reiving expeditions. The crucial difference, in the years of the Rough Wooing, is the phrase ‘per mandatum’ or ‘by commandment’. The Armstrongs, Croziers, Forsters, Grahams and Nixons were employed as full-time wreckers and terrorists. They burned entire towns instead of farmsteads and were so efficient that the clerks, who usually made a note of every ruined town, hamlet and barn, every man captured or killed and every animal driven off, sometimes gave up and lapsed into summary:

  13th March [1544]

  Archebald Armestronge, by my Lord Whartons commaundement.

  . . .

  Townes, onsettz, graunges and hamlettis spoyled and burnt

  124

  Oxen and kene brought awaye

  3,285

  Horss and naggis brought awaye

  332

  Shepe and gete brought awaye

  4,710

  Prysoners taken

  408

  Menne slayne

  35

  Grete quantity of insight brought awaye, over and besydes a grete quantite of corne and insight, and a greate nombre of all sortes of catail burned in the townes and howss, and is not nombred in the lettres, and menye menne also hurt.19

  The huge difference between state-sponsored violence and traditional reiving was that reiving, though scarcely harmless, maintained rather than wrecked the social fabric. When the Scottish Referendum campaigns pressed Anglo-Scottish history into political service, it became even harder to distinguish the activities of reivers from the clash of nations. But social history does not come to a halt because two countries are at war. In spite of all the death and misery of the Rough Wooing, the society of Border reivers not only survived but became more of a nuisance than before.

  *

  It was during this savage campaign that some peculiarly outrageous behaviour of the borderers was first recorded by officers on both sides. The carnage would be well under way – the soldiers having orders to kill and to take no prisoners – when some Scottish and English warriors, standing less than a spear’s length from each other, were seen to be engaged in polite conversation. When they noticed the furious eye of a commanding officer, they began to prance about like novices in a fencing school, striking, as it were, only ‘by assent and appointment’. Some of those faux combatants eventually left the battlefield with half a dozen prisoners who seemed quite undismayed by their capture. This was all the more incredible since these men who seemed to be treading the planks of a stage rather than a blood-soaked mire were beyond suspicion of cowardice. These were the English and Scottish borderers whose reputation for martial skill and bravery was second to none.

  It was observed that some of the Scottish soldiers had tied kerchiefs around their arms and that certain significant letters were embroidered on their caps, so that ‘they might be known to the enemie, as the enemies are known to them . . . and so in conflict each to spare or to gently take the other’. The English soldiers wore the red cross of St George, but no image of king or country was engraved on their hearts: the crosses they wore were flimsy tissues so carelessly attached ‘that a puffe of wynde might blowe them from their breastes’.

  These stirring acts of non-aggression on the field of battle belong to Anglo-Scottish history as much as the slaughter of Bannockburn and Flodden. The loyalty of these men was to each other and their surname. As soon as the foreigners from Edinburgh and London had departed, when the cattle had been retrieved and the cottages rethatched, life would go on as before.

  A state of union existed in the Borders more than a century before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Scots and English traded with each other illegally without obtaining a licence; they met at markets and horse races, hunted together and played football. Sport inevitably conjures up images of national rivalry as though the flight of a ball can be followed through several centuries of history. A notorious game which took place in 1599 is mentioned by George MacDonald Fraser as ‘the fore-runner of the Scotland v. England internationals’. Fraser’s text is quoted on the information panel which stands in front of the Armstrong pele tower at Hollows: ‘The final score was two dead and thirty taken prisoner!’ The game in question was a six-a-side contest between the Armstrongs of Whithaugh (the away team) and the men of Bewcastle. It was announced in advance and, having been properly organized, was to be followed by a post-match ‘drynkyng hard at Bewcastle house’.

  The bloody battles of nationalistic hooligan armies in Glasgow and London led to the abandonment of the annual Scotland v. England football match in 1989. In 1599, the violence had nothing to do with chauvinism. The first account of the incident, signed by eight members of the Ridley family, turned out to be grossly inaccurate. The Ridleys, who were at loggerheads with the Armstrongs, misrepresented the local-league football game as an invasion of England. Alerted by the Ridleys, the English soldiers stationed at Bewcastle were ordered to ‘catch [the Armstrongs] in English ground’ and thus avoid the offence of ‘entering Scotland’. Unfortunately for the Ridleys, ‘secret intelligence’ of their plot reached the Armstrongs. The result was an ambush instead of a football game. Three Englishmen were killed, thirty taken prisoner, and ‘many sore hurt, especially John Whytfeild, whose bowells came out, but are sowed up agayne, and is thought shall hardly escape, but as yet lyveth’.

  *

  It is typical of the lopsidedness of reiver history that we know almost as much about their football matches as we do about their women. The world of the reivers is one of swords and lances, guns and helmets; it has the stench of sweat and carnage, of wet leather and rough whisky. Its sounds are not the flutter of a spindle or the creak of a cradle but the thud of galloping hooves, the crack of burning thatch and breaking bones
, the cursing and grunting of men driving cattle, kicking footballs, beating the life out of a warden’s trooper.

  In the remnants of a vanished society, the smallest fragment of a woman’s life is worth a fortune, but the details have to be teased out of a mass of masculine detail. The published sources have very little to say about women. Excluding royalty, the ratio of men to women in the books I consulted on the subject is about fifty to one. There are the ‘wild’ women of Kielder, who ‘had no other dress than a bedgown and petticoat’. There are fleeting glimpses of domestic lives in the pots and pans and bedsheets carted off by reivers, but individual women are almost entirely missing. Most are widows and nearly all appear as victims – an Isabell Rowtledge whose livestock and possessions were stolen by a thirty-strong mob of Elliots in 1581; a Margaret Forster of Allergarth who lost her livestock in 1588 while Thome Forster of the same place (probably her brother) lost the ‘insight of his house’ and his ‘wrytinges’. We know that Hector of Harelaw had a daughter but not how she spent her days in a tower above the Liddel. The tribe of ‘Old Rich of Netherby’ was said by one English border official to number twenty-two sons, ‘and a nomber more that I cannot calle to memorye’, plus all the male offspring of his daughters, ‘which altogeather be more then a hundreth men besydes women’. The latter were evidently not worth counting.

  Most of the women who have left a trace are either the implausible phantoms of the ballads or, assuming that they actually existed, women whose behaviour entitled them to be considered honorary men, such as ‘fair maiden Lilliard’ who fought at the Battle of Ancrum Moor in 1545: