The Debatable Land Read online

  Under Wharton’s command, the southern half of the Debatable Land began to look like part of England. Its pastures were enclosed and the tracts of black moss were interrupted by paddocks and patches of green corn. The idea, in part, was to attract settlers and to discourage the ‘idle and unprofitable’ by making farming more efficient. But the double quickset hedges and six-foot-wide ditches were also part of a vast and bewildering fortification: the paths between fields were to be made ‘narrow and somewhat crooked so that the enemy or thief might be met at corners and annoyed by crossbow or other means’. Similarly, the Scottish government decreed that, in lieu of fortresses, the Debatable Land would be ‘occupyt and manurit in maner of husbandrie’.

  In addition, watches were to be kept from the first night of October to the sixteenth of March. The watches along the border were entrusted to the Grahams, who were to be paid by the English government. Two riders would patrol each section from the foot of the Lyne, along the Esk and up the Liddel to Haythwaiteburn, and then four riders on each section from Haythwaiteburn to Kershopefoot, where the river was easier to ford.

  The odd thing about Wharton’s ‘order of watches’ is that these are the old Debatable Land boundaries, not the new national border which follows the Sark up to the Scots’ Dike. Somehow, in this twilight of its long history, the Debatable Land survived its abolition. Like a coppiced hazel cut to within an inch of the ground, it sent up shoots which seemed more vigorous than ever, as though the attempt to annihilate it only served to reveal the reason and rightness of the ancient agreement.

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  The idea of using the Grahams of the Debatable Land as a local defence force was inspired by a new English policy which is best described as wishful thinking. The Grahams would be pardoned of all previous offences and encouraged to defend their misappropriated lands along the border. They had been multiplying steadily now for several decades. Old Riche of Netherby, Fargus of Mote, Thomas of Kirkanders, Umfraye ‘Shag’ Graham and the other pioneers had spawned an impressively large tribe.23 In 1561, more than one hundred adult male Grahams were living in and around the Debatable Land, with probably twice that number of subservient tenants.

  By the end of the century, these frontier farmers would be able to raise a cavalry force of three hundred men. They would constitute a kind of buffer state, the powerful advantages and equally powerful disadvantages of which were repeatedly aired in official reports: their ‘service might be acceptable if they were restrayned in some sort . . . these Grames are not so daungerous to England as others are. But they ride still into Scotland. There is many of them.’

  The principal agents of English and Scottish authority were still the wardens, but they would no longer be left to rule the Borders as they saw fit. Until then, both governments had conferred power on local magnates out of necessity. Now, as they tried to exercise more centralized control, their strategies inevitably differed: Edinburgh lay a day and a night to the north, but it took most of a week to reach the West Marches from London. The Scots, therefore, despite finding the English solution unduly optimistic (giving land to reivers ‘shall not suffice to make them good men’), continued to use border chieftains whose excesses could, theoretically, be repressed by punitive raids. The result was that the new border was ignored, as it is today, except by administrators and outsiders. The former but still extant Debatable Land was treated, both by the Grahams and by the semi-independent Scottish wardens, as a zone ripe for conquest.

  Strict instructions were issued by both governments forbidding the importing and exporting of horses – especially mares – but nothing could stop the interbreeding of the human population. Though the Scots’ Dike had separated the ‘English’ Grahams from the ‘Scottish’ Armstrongs, a merging of clans had taken place, and when the details were made known in a report to the English Privy Council at the end of 1583, thirty years after the division, it appeared that an anarchic principality had been evolving all along. No fewer than thirteen Graham–Armstrong marriages were recorded, all in the same generation. Of those thirteen couples, eight lived inside the Debatable Land and the remaining five on its edges.

  Some time in the 1580s or 90s, the region was explored and mapped by Timothy Pont, a graduate of St Andrews University who undertook a solitary expedition to almost every part of Scotland. His manuscript maps of the Borders have been lost, but they were used by Joan Blaeu for his atlas of Scotland (1654). The region is named ‘Lidalia’, in Latin, as though Liddesdale formed a distinct country. On either side of the ‘March Dyik’, the Debatable Land is sprinkled with little towers representing smallholdings or groups of cottages – twenty-three in England and thirty-nine in Scotland. They are concentrated along the rivers but are already edging up to the Solway Moss and the ‘Torback hills’ below the Roman road on the northern boundary.

  Scottish Liddesdale – comprising the catchment area of Liddel Water and the northern Debatable Land – was separately administered by the Keeper of Liddesdale. He was expected to occupy or at least command the lonely fortress of the Hermitage. He had to be a man of great wealth, with lands to defend and a willingness to repress any trouble with lethal efficiency, if necessary in person. Official ‘letters of fire and sword’ entitled him to kill without judicial proceedings.

  The Debatable Land had now been placed under modern administration. From that moment on, it seemed to slide back into an earlier, more chaotic era as though warlords from the Dark Age had come riding out of their burial mounds to rule over long-forgotten kingdoms.

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  Given the requirements of the job, it is no wonder that the most prominent Keepers of Liddesdale were two of the most violent adventurers of the Elizabethan age: the fifth Earl of Bothwell and the Duke of Buccleuch (pronounced ‘Bucloo’). The Earls of Bothwell had been lords of Liddesdale almost without interruption since 1491. From the dank bastion of the Hermitage, they controlled that Khyber Pass of the Borders which leads up through Liddesdale and down into lowland Scotland. For more than a hundred years, they battled the tribes of Armstrongs, Croziers, Elliots, Forsters and Nixons. Sometimes, the wounds had barely healed when those same versatile warriors banded together under the leadership of their oppressor to launch lucrative raids on the surrounding lands.

  When Mary Stuart rode to the Hermitage in 1569 (here), the Keeper of Liddesdale was James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell. His nephew, Francis Stewart, assumed the title in 1585. ‘Little Jock’ Elliot, who had nearly killed the fourth Earl, was still going strong and now had several sons to help him. They served the fifth Earl as a private army. With the tacit connivance of James VI, Bothwell launched deniable raids into England, some of which were deemed by the English to constitute military invasions. There were fears that ‘a warre might arise betwixt the realmes’. It was largely because of Bothwell and the ‘Lyddesdales’ (the men of Liddesdale) that the state of the Borders in the 1580s remained ‘verie ticklie and dangerous’.

  The records of this violent period of ‘peace’ between the two nations are full of microscopic mysteries and unsolved crimes. The system of redress and days of truce broke down almost completely and the intricacies of clan feuds, land-grabbing expeditions, reiving raids, invasions and counter-invasions can be as hard to follow as the moss-troopers’ secret paths. How, for instance, did Lance ‘Bonnyboots’ Armstrong come into possession of the extraordinary sum of £4,000 sterling? In those isolated valleys, even two centuries later, money was of little practical use, but some of the reiving families had ‘koyners’ who turned stolen metal into coin of the realm, and this cottage industry would have provided their occasional employer, the fifth Earl of Bothwell, with a handy source of income.

  Bothwell’s reign was benign compared to that of his successor. Walter Scott, the Laird of Buccleuch, whose mother had married the fifth Earl, became Keeper of Liddesdale in 1591. His descendant, the current duke, is the biggest private landowner in the United Kingdom. In 1591, the estate was already enormous and grew larger under his
rule. Before and after his appointment, Buccleuch was one of the few reivers who purposely killed his victims. Along with hunting and horse racing, murder was his favourite sport. The adjective which has stuck to his name – along with ‘dashing’, ‘colourful’ and ‘generous’ – is ‘bold’, because he appears as ‘the bold Buccleuch’ in the ballad of Kinmont Willie (here). Another ballad dubs him ‘the gude auld Lord’. (Balladeers and travelling minstrels had to eat.) The activities of the real Buccleuch are a useful gauge of the historical accuracy of the ballads:

  But since nae war’s between the lands,

  And there is peace, and peace should be;

  I’ll neither harm English lad or lass,

  And yet the Kinmont freed shall be!

  One Sunday in the spring of 1597, according to the ‘bill’ or complaint of the English border officials, the thirty-two-year-old Buccleuch galloped into Tynedale with his men.

  Sparing neither age nor sex, he cruelly murdered and slew thirty-five of her Majesty’s subjects, of which number some he cut in part with his own hand, some he burnt with fire, some he drowned in rivers, and wilfully and for destruction sake burnt and spoiled. He drove away the poor inhabitants by the terror of his hostility, and taking the goods of the country, divided them amongst his soldiers by way of reward for their service. This cruel and odious act being accomplished with this circumstance, that it was done upon the holy Sabbath.

  The Tynedale massacre was just the latest of Buccleuch’s sprees, the effect of which was quite unlike that of the traditional reiving raids. The people of Tynedale not only fled from their burning homes, they also abandoned the summer shielings,24 ‘which is theire chefest profitt’ and will not ‘venture themselves without such guard against his continued cruelty’. As the appointed dispenser of justice, Buccleuch, in contrast to the common reivers, rode in broad daylight with trumpets blaring, though some of his ‘bold’ justice was administered more secretly. Somewhere between Langholm and Ewes, off the road to Edinburgh, there was a ‘dubb’ or deep hole in the bog into which ‘my Lord Buckpleugh did wapp the outlaws’.

  This repeated rewilding of the Debatable Land served the purposes of both governments just as well as the enclosure and cultivation of its pastures. Encouraged by the wardens to behave like savages, the reivers were increasingly seen as Highlanders of the south. They were no longer just troublemakers but ‘wicked’ and primitive barbarians. A Scottish statute of 1587 lumped the ‘disordered subjects’ of the Borders together with those of the Highlands and Islands who ‘delight in all mischiefs, and most unnaturally and cruelly ravage, slay, plunder and destroy their own neighbours and native country people’. When Bothwell was relieved of his duties as Keeper of Liddesdale, it was considered appropriate to put him in charge of the Isles of Lewis and Skye. In the mental geography of administrators, the Borders had never been so remote. Later, as British dominion extended overseas, the reivers would be likened to ‘Ostrogoths’, ‘Kaffirs’ and ‘Hottentots’, ‘a set of wild men, who . . . kept the southern part of Scotland and the northern part of England in a perpetual civil war’.

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  Taking a long-term view of the matter, these troublesome clans were not the enemies but the servants of the two crowns. They were the unwitting advance guard of a single British nation which divided, ‘manured’ and civilized the Debatable Land, eventually erasing even the memory of its significance. As communications improved and small territories could no longer exist in isolation, it was inevitable that the Debatable Land would disappear and that peace would destroy what war had preserved. This was a result of historical processes in which individual personalities ultimately played a negligible role, though they may occasionally have risen up like shattered trees in a flood of the Liddel.

  Until the last decade of the sixteenth century, when trouble spread to the towns and the rampaging of the wardens came to be seen as a diplomatic embarrassment, neither government had considered traditional Border reiving in itself to constitute a national emergency. Both governments could tolerate a certain amount of civil disorder, especially in a region which contributed little to the Treasury.

  The reivers themselves appeared to have played only a peripheral role in the events of their time. This is one of the roots of their popularity: they seem to belong to an ageless, enchanted realm detached from all the complexities of historical chronology. In the records of their exploits, there are few reminders of the outside world: the French involvement in the division of the Debatable Land, fears of Spanish spies and Irish rebels crossing into England, or the periods of intensified misrule called ‘busy weeks’ when a monarch died or left the country. It was a rare event when a reiving inhabitant of the Debatable Land entered the stage of national history. Even then, like so many other incidents of Border history, the facts had to be twisted and travestied before they could be incorporated into the narrative of the two nations.

  In December 1569, the Armstrong known as Hector (‘Eckie’) of Harelaw, whose tower overlooked the Liddel in the eastern Debatable Land, offered asylum to Thomas Percy, the seventh Earl of Northumberland. Percy was one of the nobles of northern England who had plotted to depose Elizabeth I and to place her prisoner, Mary Queen of Scots, at the head of a Catholic state. The so-called Rising of the North was swiftly crushed and the leaders, including Thomas Percy, fled to the borderlands. On Christmas Eve, the ‘rebel earls’ were reported by English spies to be ‘lurking and hiding themselves in the woods and deserts of Lyddesdale’. Shortly afterwards, they were forced ‘to fly to one of the Armstrongs upon the Debeateable’ (sic).

  Only in that undeclared and lawless country could they hope to be safe. For a few days, Percy enjoyed the reiver’s hospitality. The site of Hector’s tower or bastle was last recorded in the nineteenth century, when the foundation stones were removed by a carter. The site was then engulfed by a pine plantation. Cycling by in the early winter of 2015, I noticed a mechanical harvester felling the trees. The following Sunday, I walked up the freshly exposed bank and saw the long-obliterated view.

  From Hector’s windows, Thomas Percy would have been able to keep watch on a five-mile stretch of the Liddel valley. Over in England, the slopes behind Haythwaite and Catlowdy are stacked up like terraces: soldiers approaching on the roads from Bewcastle and Carlisle would have been easy to spot as they crossed the ridge of Kingfield Hass or rode down towards the river from the junction now marked by the white facade of the Bridge Inn. As he scanned that silent winter scene, Percy could not have known that the danger lay within. A large sum of money had been paid to his host by the Scottish regents, who had no desire to serve a Catholic queen. Percy was seized and handed over to the Scottish authorities, who sold him on to England. Three years later, he was beheaded at York.

  Meanwhile (so the traditional story goes), having broken the reivers’ code of honour, Hector of Harelaw became an object of repulsion far and wide. He fell into poverty and died, ‘despised and neglected’. So infamous was his treachery that his name entered the language: ‘to take Hector’s cloak’ meant to betray the confidence of a friend.

  This is one of the fanciful tales which were supposed to supply the moral that seemed to be missing from events. There is no sign that any reiving family ever took sides in a religious conflict or felt a sense of loyalty to a high-born Englishman from another part of the country. Hector of Harelaw was not unique: the first person to betray Thomas Percy was a member of the Elliot family, and an Armstrong who lived a few miles up the valley had already shown him the kind of hospitality a noble gentleman could expect in the borderlands.

  No ‘code of honour’ had been in evidence when the fugitive earls reached Liddesdale. They had stayed with John Armstrong of the Side (near the present-day Newcastleton) in ‘a cottage not to be compared to a dog kennel in England’. During their stay, the horse of Percy’s wife had been stolen along with those of her maid servants as well as ten other horses: when the Percys and their retinue passed from Upper Liddesdale into
the Debatable Land, they did so on foot. Percy’s confederate, the Earl of Westmorland, had been forced to exchange his suit of armour and sword for those of his host, who must have relished the spectacle of an English lord dressed up as a Border reiver.

  The tale that ‘the tratour Eckie of Hairlaw’ was shunned and despised even by ‘his own nearest kinsmen’ appears to have begun as a fantasy of the poem-writing commissioner, Richard Maitland. Fourteen years after Percy’s arrest, a list of all the Border riders included ‘Hector Armestronge of the Harlawe and his frendes and allyes’. By then, he was known as ‘Ould Hector’. Both his son (‘Yonge Hector’) and his daughter had married Grahams. The sinister nickname ascribed to Ould Hector – ‘Hector of the Griefs and Cuts’ – comes from an inaccurate paraphrase of a misread manuscript: in a list of the inhabitants of the Debatable Land, ‘Hector of the Harlaw’ is followed, in a separate entry, by ‘The griefs and cuts of Harlaw’ (mistranscribing ‘the thiefs and out[law]s’). All the documentary evidence suggests that ‘Hector of ye Harlawe’, whose tower is shown on a map of 1590, lived to a ripe old age in his home above the Liddel, surrounded by his numerous progeny, honoured by ‘friends and allies’ and enjoying the fruits of his innumerable crimes.

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  Scrope

  The hovel worse than a ‘dog kennel’ in which the fugitives had stayed would have been the grubby, makeshift farmhouse which could be abandoned for the fireproof pele tower when a raid was expected. The permanent homes of wealthy reivers such as ‘Ould Hector’ were not entirely uncongenial. As the Debatable Land became more productive, its ‘lairds’ sat on chairs and settles instead of cold stone seats. Feather mattresses replaced the scented bedding of rushes, thyme and heather. In 1598, an English visitor to a border ‘knight’ – probably the Laird of Buccleuch – witnessed, without knowing it, a transformation in living conditions: