The Debatable Land Read online

  21st July – Report of concern for a person’s well-being.

  Then came the following litany:

  31st July – Theft housebreaking, Riccarton Farm.

  31st July – Theft housebreaking, Hewisbridge Cottage.

  31st July – Theft housebreaking, Mountain View.

  31st July – Theft housebreaking, Steele Road End Cottage.

  31st July – Theft housebreaking, Dinlabyre.

  The sequence of places shows that the burglars were following the old reiving route from Teviotdale, crossing the watershed by Note o’ the Gate pass and down into Liddesdale along Liddel Water. The crimes are as yet unsolved, and it seems likely that the thieves were heading either for Langholm in the next valley or for the English border and the city of Carlisle, where stolen goods will always find a buyer. After this latter-day Liddesdale raid, the crime list returns to normal:

  2nd August – Two youths annoying residents. Youths traced and spoken to.

  6th August – Vehicle accident in Saughtree area. Minor injury to driver.

  6th August – Request assistance with dog. Advice given.

  11

  Accelerated Transhumance

  After the excursion to the Queen’s Mire, the dense drizzle cum sea-fog called a ‘Liddesdale drow’ settled in, defying the waterproof guarantees of cycle-clothing manufacturers. A ‘Liddesdale drow’, pointedly defined in a Scottish dictionary of 1841 as ‘a shower that wets an Englishman to the skin’, is a phenomenon easily observed. I have often looked down over Liddesdale from the high roads in the east to see a dense bank of cloud funnelling up the valley, while the hillsides remained clear, and returned, quite dry, to find the lonning awash and the woods loud with waterfalls. This is the natural wonder which the warden of the West March Henry Scrope described to Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham in 1584. He and his troops had stumbled into a dream world and become totally lost:

  I set furthe, the weather being verie fayre everie where in all the countrie, till we came to the boundes of Lyddesdale, wher their was growen suche a terrible and foggie myst as is wonderfull to be uttred . . . wherin my companye were mervelouslie seperated and dispersed from me . . . and all guydes who were there verie well acqueynted, were utterlie voyde of any knowledge where they were! . . . The strangenes of this myst is the more, for that besydes that they of Lyddedales them selves, who had gathered them selfes togeather to have done some injorie to our people, were in like sorte in that countrie wholly dispersed one companye from an other – all the other countries rownde about everie waye bothe in England and Scotland . . . being verie cleare and fayre without either myst or rayne.

  Perhaps the climatic conditions explained why there had been so little crime, apart from in the months of reiving.

  The river sang its tireless song of the open sea. We went out every day, either to dig drainage channels on the lonning or to cycle up to the high peaks of the area in the hope of rising above the ‘drow’ to glimpse the Solway in the west and the sodden green pastures of the Debatable Land gleaming below the pine-blackened ridges.

  The questions now took a different form. Reiving had been a crucial part of border society, but how had this kleptocratic system actually worked? Stealing other people’s property hardly seemed a firm basis for an ordered society. For the ancient Celts, too, cattleraiding had been a vital tradition. The Gauls had honoured Hercules the cattle thief as a founder of their race. In the early Irish epic ‘The Cattle-Raid of Cooley’, rustling was associated with the heroic deeds of a demi-god. A sixth-century poem of ‘the Old North’ (northern England and southern Scotland) celebrated the reiving prowess of Urien, King of Rheged. Other pastoral cultures had comparable myths and legends.

  The border reivers have only a geographical connection with the ‘Celtic’ world. Few of them would have understood (still less uttered) the Gaelic phrase ‘Fàilte gu Alba’ which appears on signs welcoming drivers to Scotland at Kirkandrews and Gretna Green: Gaelic has not been widely spoken here since the fourteenth century. But as habitual cattle-raiders, they pose the same questions, and the records of their deeds offered some hope of answers.

  Why, for example, did the human population of this ravaged zone increase throughout the years of reiving? Why was there no catastrophic decline in the domestic animal population? For that matter, why did all the livestock not end up in the West Marches, crammed into the overstocked barmkins of the Armstrongs, Elliots and Grahams? How – and why – were fresh sheep, cattle and oxen continually produced in the regions which suffered most from the reivers’ predation?

  When summer drew to a close, the mother of a ‘riding’ family is reputed to have said to her son, ‘Ride, Rowley, hough’s i’ th’ pot,’ meaning that the last of the meat (the hock) was now being cooked and it was time to go and steal some more. An ancestor of Walter Scott made the same point by serving up a dish of spurs as a heavy hint to the menfolk. These tales may be folklore but they do express the apparent lopsidedness of the reivers’ world.

  Where was the incentive to spend every waking hour rearing animals and growing their fodder when their fattened limbs would only end up on someone else’s table? Was this the incurable disease of optimism or simply the mindless comfort of an inherited way of life? ‘I don’t know why I bother’ is a phrase on the lips of many a Cumbrian farmer. The reiving supermarkets have their own code of conduct which allows them to pay dairy farmers less than it costs to produce the milk. But even if the farmer’s tax return shows zero profit, life can go on as before in the tiny farmhouse within its fortress of barns and sheds.

  In a pastoral society unsupported by European farming subsidies, the answers to such conundrums usually lie with the animals themselves. Sheep and cows are transhumant. Instinct propels them from one meadow to the next. If a hedge or a fence has a gap, a sheep will find it, however small the gap or large the sheep. Cows migrate around a field with such inconspicuous slowness that, unless they are watched, they seem to teleport themselves to different parts of the field as though in a time-lapse film. Worshippers at the church of Kirkandrews near the Scots’ Dike sometimes arrive for a service through meadows which appear deserted, only to find, when they leave the church, that the parking area is besieged by stationary cows.

  Where the land is poor, the transhumant animals have to be driven, often great distances, to fresh pastures. Eventually, they are driven to market or, as usually happened in the borderlands, slaughtered before the onset of winter. Under the reiving system, cattle and sheep were forced to perform athletic feats of endurance and subjected to an intensified process of natural selection. Some grew stronger, the weak died and, over time, the stock improved. This accelerated transhumance is perhaps not unusual in frontier societies. The Texan cowboys of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove are, in the natural way of things, rustlers as well as ranchers:

  Every now and then, about sundown, the Captain and Augustus and Pea and Deets would strap on guns and ride off into that darkness, into Mexico, to return about sunup with thirty or forty horses or perhaps a hundred skinny cattle. It was the way the stock business seemed to work along the border . . . Some of the skinny cattle spent their lives being chased back and forth across the Rio Grande.

  In the Anglo-Scottish borders, this system was underpinned by March law. On the days of truce, the livestock producers would receive the value of their stolen animals – in money, corn or merchandise – exactly as though they had been sold at market. In many cases, the guilty party would pay twice the value of what had been stolen, along with what is now termed a ‘victim surcharge’, for all the time and trouble caused, equal to the original value. The attendant festivities – gambling and football, bartering and haggling, gossiping and courting – proceeded without the distraction of flocks and herds, while, at the assessor’s table, every last sheep, cow, ox, horse and donkey, as well as all the household goods, were carefully recorded by a scribe. If anyone convicted of reiving tried to escape punishment and r
efused to pay, he would be subjected to the ignominy of ‘bauchling’ (here): ‘They think there cannot be a greater mark of disgrace than this, and esteem it a greater punishment even than an honourable death inflicted on the guilty person’.

  It goes without saying that reiving was not a system deliberately devised by committees and upheld by general agreement. But for all the aggravation, fear and suffering it caused, it allowed a particular society in a remote, impoverished region to survive for many centuries. Seen from a distance, the movements of border livestock have a logic as elegant as that of a flight of geese. The natural crossroads of the West Marches, and especially the region of the Debatable Land, were an obvious destination. It is no coincidence that Longtown, which visitors from the south might mistake for a one-horse town, is home to the biggest sheep market in Britain.

  *

  The reiving economy flourished at a time when one period of economic history was ending and another beginning. The pre-medieval world in which cattle were treated as common property was adapting to the modern world in which personal property had a specific, transferable value. The days of truce served to regulate the ebb and flow of assets. Especially when the wardens were in control, justice could be slow in coming, but in the meantime, the effects of reiving were mitigated by the much-maligned institution of blackmail. This was protection money or, more often, payment in kind to a powerful neighbour who assumed the responsibility of organizing a ‘hot trod’ whenever anything was stolen. A band of swift and tested reivers would set off in pursuit of the thieves, crossing – quite legally under March law – into Scotland or England to recover the goods.12

  ‘Blackmail’ is often cited as one of the reivers’ two lasting contributions to the English language. The other is ‘bereaved’, said to have referred originally to a person who lost a loved one to a reiver. ‘Bereaved’ (or ‘bereft’) simply meant ‘robbed’. It was not applied to the loss of a loved one until the mid-seventeenth century, long after the heyday of the reivers. Neither ‘bereaved’ nor ‘blackmail’ were peculiar to the Borders, yet both are repeatedly held up as proof of the reivers’ unique depravity, as though a society which exists independently of a larger, neighbouring state must inevitably be criminal.

  The word ‘blackmail’ acquired its nefarious meaning only when the traditional practice had been turned into a protection racket by thugs such as Johnnie Armstrong. In July 1596, the writer of an ignorant official report on ‘the decayes of the Borders’ assumed that ‘black’ was the colour of the reiver’s soul: ‘this bribenge they call Blackmeale, in respecte that the cause for which yt is taken is fowle and dishoneste . . . and is paid in meale corn or victuall’. ‘Mail’, from the Old Norse ‘mal’, meant ‘tribute’ or ‘rent’ – which was sometimes paid in meal or grain – while ‘black’ was the common collective noun for cows, bulls and oxen, which were usually black. ‘Grassmail’ was money paid to a landowner for grazing rights; ‘blackmail’ paid for the protection and recovery of cattle.

  These institutions were as much a boon to border farmers of the Middle Ages as insurance was to their descendants. A medieval farmer of Redesdale or Tynedale could expect to have his property returned or to be compensated when his house was burned down. Even in the early twentieth century, before the advent of affordable insurance, similar disasters were likely to spell the end of a farmer’s career. Blackmail became a burden only when the beneficiary was forced to pay additional rent to a feudal lord, a corrupt warden or a gangster.

  In answering various accusations, the laird and outlaw Richard Grayme (Graham) of Brackenhill tried to explain the practice to the English warden, Thomas Scrope, in 1596. (The letter was written by a lawyer since Graham himself was illiterate.) Blackmail was the remuneration of ‘such money as he had expended in redeeming the tenants’ goods’. If Scrope did his duty as a warden and saved him the expense of protecting ‘his poor neighbours’ from ‘Scottish’ invaders, there would be no further need for blackmail.

  A weak man buckling under heavy responsibilities, Scrope failed to exploit the potential of the system. He saw only its criminal abuse – the bullying of tenants and the nailing of demands for payment to church doors in Canonbie and Arthuret. Having decided that there was only one remedy for unruliness, he came up with the idea of making blackmail a capital offence and thereby helped to destroy the institutions which, in spite of Anglo-Scottish animosity, had kept the Borders in a strange state of peace.

  12

  Skurrlywarble

  The weather finally improved. The last snows were washed out of the woodland. Boulders which had been arrested by the frozen clay came crashing down, dividing a waterfall into two torrents or resting against pliant stems of hazel. A band of surly sheep which had occasionally passed through the woodland like ghosts headed for the grassy banks of the Liddel, munched then spat out the snowdrops which the river had brought and wandered off in the direction of Longtown.

  Among the oak, the alder and the birch, unidentifiable trees were coming into leaf. More than a hundred exotic specimens had been planted by Nicholas Ridley in the 1980s. Most had long since succumbed to the conspiracy of boulder clay and wind, but some had made themselves at home and even flourished, finding North Cumbria a fair approximation to the Caucasus Mountains or the Himalayas.

  One evening, a fire rose behind the forest. I grabbed a torch and scrambled up along the side of a gully to the top of the ridge: a huge red moon was darting its flames between the branches. A few lights glimmered to the north where a row of small houses sits in the lee of Harelaw Pike on the eastern edge of the Debatable Land. Just below the ridge was a small level area where a hare or a roe deer had rubbed the ground and exposed the earth. Sheltered by two low embankments, it formed a kind of parapet like the roof-walk of a pele tower. Fifty feet below, two headlights were inching towards the house. I saw a figure emerge. It knocked at the front door, waited for a minute, then returned to the car. There was no time to scramble down the slope. At that distance, the gleam of a torch would have been either invisible or baffling, and no voice, especially one directed downwards, could compete with the river’s fortissimo.

  This was terrain which lent itself to stealth and private sociability. Reivers returned from raids to unobtrusive towers and bastles which might have escaped the attention of a passing horseman but where a watch could be kept or a beacon lit that would alert a whole family network to approaching danger. In the enclosing wall of the barmkin, the reek of peat smoke and the fug of warm animals were the heart of an independent community, and each of those microcosmic settlements was contained within another, wider world of secluded cleughs and surprisingly open valleys.

  *

  The reports and letters of the wardens showed how much sifting and arranging of the evidence it took to produce the traditional image of the reiver: the satanic riders of the museum in Carlisle were based on a handful of thugs who exploited their neighbours; the tearful widow of the ballad was the victim of an official raid by King James V of Scotland, not of a band of reivers. No single voice could be trusted, especially not that of the ecclesiastical windbag who so memorably cursed the Border reivers along with their children, animals and household goods in his ‘Great Monition’ of 1525.

  That curiously ordered world was coming into view as a country in its own right, with its own laws, institutions and traditions, and the quiet enclave at its heart looked less like ‘the sink and receptacle of proscribed wretches’ and more like the key to an otherwise impenetrable society. The Debatable Land had been misrepresented and misidentified. Its name was not a general term for the blackest parts of the Borders: it referred to a precisely defined area in which no permanent building had been allowed. Animals could be pastured there, but only between sunrise and sunset, and the soil was not to be cultivated, ploughed or ‘opened’ in any way. For the reivers themselves, the name was practically the opposite of ‘debatable’. As Lord Dacre reported in 1517, ‘there is no strife for the boundes’ of the Debatable
Land, ‘but it is wele knawne by the subjects of bothe the realmes’.

  I was amazed to discover that the true meaning of the name had been lost. The Debatable Land was sometimes referred to, especially in the earliest documents, as the ‘batable’ or ‘battable land’. The more usual terms for disputed territory were, in English, ‘threpe’ or ‘threap’ lands – a word which survives in several place names – or, in Latin, ‘terra contentiosa’. ‘Batable’ was a common abbreviation for ‘debatable’, but it also had an entirely different meaning.

  ‘Batable’ comes from the obsolete verb ‘batten’. Batable land was rich, fertile land on which livestock could be pastured and fattened up (or ‘battened’). By the 1800s, the word had fallen out of use.13 Walter Scott knew it only as the shortened form of ‘debatable’, modern historians are unaware of it, and it was already unknown to most of the sixteenth-century officials who governed the Borders. Yet this is clearly its original sense and the reason why the Batable Land had endured:

  There is a grounde . . . betwene the realmes of England and Scotland [which] allweyes has been used and accustumed to pasture upon the same grounde with bit of mouthe, from the sonne rising to the sonne setting, with all maner of cattell, for the subjects of bothe the realmes.

  This ‘batable land’ had been a world apart for several centuries or, as the documents said, since ‘ancient’ times. Despite the commercial value of its woods and grasslands, its integrity had been respected. The law which stated that no building should be erected within its boundaries nor any animals pastured there between sunset and sunrise would be broken only in the 1510s, by the Grahams and Armstrongs, and even they would restrict themselves to its perimeter and a narrow corridor along the Esk.

  Its uniqueness was a sign of its antiquity. Unlike the cantref or hundred of Arwystli in the Welsh Marches, it was not disputed but recognized as neutral by both sides. It was not ‘common land’, which is to say private land over which certain rights such as pasturage could be exercised, since it was not owned by a manor or the crown, and its fields and other resources were not recorded in title deeds. As its later history would prove, it was not waste ground to which no one thought it worth staking a claim.