Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to be unexpectedly modern and matter-of-fact. The classically steepled building that bulks commandingly in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the Town Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick prominently, the municipal escutcheon supported on either side by a sculptured bear sitting on his rump and surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the disputed derivations of Berwick’s name is alluded to. At few towns has the origin of a place-name been so contested as at Berwick; and, for all the pother about it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered. It might as reasonably have come from aberwic, the mouth of a river, as from bergwic, the hillside village, and much more reasonably than from the fanciful “bar” prefix alluding to the bareness of the country; while of course the legend that gives the lie to that last variant, and seeks an origin in imaginary bears populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.
The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the Town Hall rings for it.
In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in 1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes, according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the answer he got was the matter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has complained o’ that hole.”
The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front, on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the way.
But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the roads.
Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to specifically mention “our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed” when promulgating decrees, for as by treaty an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland, laws and ordinances affecting Great Britain and Ireland could not legally be said to have been extended to Berwick without the especial mention of “our town.” A state whose boundaries north and south were Lamberton Toll and the Tweed, a distance of not more than four miles, with a corresponding extent from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a petty German principality. Nearly three-quarters of the land comprised within “Berwick Bounds” is the property of the Corporation, having been granted by James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune in succeeding to the English crown and thus uniting those of the two countries, he entered upon his heritage. Lucky Berwick! Its freehold property brings in a revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.
If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so historic a place, then let the pilgrim make the circuit of the town on the ramparts. These, at least, tell of martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold by the modern railway station overhanging a deep cleft. Then, away in advance of the ramparts, still thrusting its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form forward, is the old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence sudden Scottish raids might be developed at any time.
Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon the gun-platforms contrived in early Victorian days upon them, and almost every variety of obsolete cannon, short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched the Spanish Main, go to make up what—Heaven help them and us!—War Office officials call batteries. Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside batteries overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is modern. All are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an artillerist’s museum, and their carriages—where they are mounted at all—are in bewildering variety, principally, however, of rotting wood. The most recent piece, an Armstrong gun not less than fifty years old, lies derelict in the long grass, and children amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw with clods. Pot-bellied like all the old Armstrongs, it has a look as though it had grown fat and lazy with that diet and lain down in the long grass to sleep. Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing!
Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave Berwick on the way to Scotland.