The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past, however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness, yet we oft feel:
He had himself laid hand on sword
He who this rime did write!
The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional stories help but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more, and tell it better, than the dull records of the annalists. We know who these men really were—a strong, resolute race, passionate and proud, rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless devotion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasion to a certain rude eloquence; and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome. The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen; and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the Highlands to the north and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder at the burden it had to endure. For a race, whatever its good qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots, were girded at as “always riding”; and they were not particular as to whom they rode against. Nay, both governments suspected the Borderers of an inexplicable tenderness for their neighbours. When they took part in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspicious lack of heart. At best they were apt to look at war from their own point of view, and fight for mere prisoners or plunder.
To meet such conditions the Border Laws were evolved. They were administered in chief by special officers called Wardens. Either Border was portioned out into three Marches: the East, the Middle, and the West (the Lordship of Liddesdale was included in the Scots Middle March, but sometimes it had a special Keeper of almost equal dignity with a Warden.) Each of the three Scots Wardens had a hundred pounds of yearly fee; he could appoint deputies, captains of strongholds, clerks, sergeants, and dempsters; he could call out the full force of his district to invade or beat back invasion; he represented the Sovereign, and was responsible for crimes. He must keep the Border clans in order by securing as hostages several of their most conspicuous sons, and either these were quartered on nobles on the other side of the Firth, or they were held in safer keeping in the king’s castles. He also held Justice Courts for the trial of Scots subjects accused of offences against the laws of their own country. He was commonly a great noble of the district, his office in early times being often hereditary; and, as such noble, he had power of life and death, so that the need for holding special courts was little felt. A pointed Scots anecdote pictures an angry Highlander “banning” the Lords of Session as “kinless loons,” because, though some were relatives, they had decided a case against him. These Wardens were not “kinless loons,” and they often used their office to favour a friend or depress a foe. On small pretext they put their enemies “to the horn,” as the process of outlawry (by trumpet blast) was called. True, the indifference with which those enemies “went to the horn” would scandalise the legal pedants.
Sometimes a superior officer, called “Lieutenant,” was sent to the Borders; the Wardens were under him; he more fully represented the royal power. Now and again the Sovereign himself made a progress, administering a rough and ready justice, and so “dantoning the thieves of the Borders, and making the rush bush keep the cow.” So it was said of James V.’s famous raid in 1529. The chief incident was the capture of Johnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, the ruins of whose picturesque tower at the Hollows still overlook the Esk. Gilnockie came to meet his King with a great band of horsemen richly apparelled. He was captain of Langholm Castle, and the ballad tells how he and his companions exercised themselves in knightly sports on Langholm Lee, whilst “The ladies lukit frae their loft windows. ‘God bring our men well hame agen!’” the ladies said; and their apprehensions were more than justified, for Johnie’s reception was not so cordial as he expected. “What wants yon knave that a King should have?” asked James in angry amaze, as he ordered the band to instant execution. Gilnockie and company were presently strung up on some convenient yew-trees at Carlenrig, though, in accordance with romantic precedent, one is said to have escaped to tell the tale. Many of Johnie’s name, among them Ill Will Armstrong, tersely described as “another stark thieff,” went to their doom; but the act, however applauded at Edinburgh, was bitterly condemned on the Borders. Gilnockie only plundered the English, it was urged, and the King had caught him by a trick unworthy a Stuart. The country folk loved to tell how the dule-trees faded away, and they loved to point out the graves of the Armstrongs in the lonely churchyard. But the stirring ballad preserves the name better than all else. It unblushingly commends Gilnockie’s love of honesty, his generosity, his patriotism, and directly accuses his Sovereign of treachery, in which accusation there is perhaps some truth. Anyhow, his execution was the violent act of a weak man, and had no permanent effect.
The Wardens had twofold duties: first, that of defence against the enemy; second, that of negotiation in times of peace with their mighty opposites. Thus the Border laws were part police and part international, and were administered in different courts. Offences of the first class were speaking or conferring with Englishmen without permission of the King or the Warden, and the warning Englishmen of the Scots’ alertness in the matter of forays. In brief, aiding, abetting, or in any way holding intercourse with the “auld enemy” was march treason (to adopt a convenient English term).
In England the Wardens were finally chosen for their political and military skill, not because of their territorial position. Now, the Warden of the East Marches was commonly Governor and Castellan of Berwick. The castle of Harbottell was allotted to the Warden of the Middle Marches; whilst for the West, Carlisle, where again Governor and Warden were often one, was the appointed place. Sometimes a Lord warden-general was appointed, sometimes a Lieutenant, but the Wardens were commonly independent. At the Warden courts Englishmen were punished for march treason, a branch of which was furnishing the Scots with articles of merchandise or war. And here I note that Carlisle throve on this illegal traffic. At Carlisle Fair the Carlisle burgher never asked the nationality of man or beast. The first got his money or its equivalent; the second was instantly passed through the hands of butcher and skinner. Though the countryside were wasted, the burghers lay safe within their strong walls, and waxed fat on the spoils of borderman and dalesman alike. Small wonder the city was “Merrie Carlisle.” The law struck with as little force against blackmail, or protection money, which it was an offence to pay to any person, Scots or English. From this source, Gilnockie and others, coining the terror of their name, drew great revenue. Another provision was against marriage with a Scotswoman without the Warden’s consent, for in this way traitors, or “half-marrows,” arose within the gate. Complete forms are preserved of the procedure at those Warden courts. There were a grand jury and an ordinary jury, and the Warden acted very much as a judge of to-day. One or two technical terms I shall presently explain. Here I but note that the criminal guilty of march treason was beheaded “according to the customs of the marches.”
The international duties of the Wardens were those of conference with each other, and the redressing of approved wrongs, which wrongs were usually done in raids or forays. Of these I must now give some account. The smaller Border chieftain dwelt in a peel tower, stuck on the edge of a rock or at the break of a torrent. It was a rude structure with a projecting battlement. A stair or ladder even held its two stories together, and about it lay a barnkin—a space of some sixty feet encompassed by a wall; the laird’s followers dwelling in huts hard by. For small parties the tower was self-sufficient in defence, and if it lay in the way of a hostile army, the laird was duly warned by scouts or beacon fires, and withdrew to some fastness of rock or marsh, carrying his few valuables, driving his live stock before him, leaving the foeman nothing to burn and nothing to take away. With his followers he lived on milk, meat, and barley, together with the spoils of the forest and stream. The marchmen are reported temperate—no doubt from necessity. Their kine, recruited by forays, were herded in a secluded part of the glen, and when the herd waxed small, and the laird was tired of hunting, and his women lusted after new ornament, and old wounds were healed, and the retainers were growing rusty, then it was time for a raid. Was the laird still inactive? In struck his lady’s sharper wit, and the story goes that Wat Scott of Harden was ever and anon served with a dish which, being uncovered, revealed a pair of polished spurs. Thus his wife, Mary Scott, the “Flower of Yarrow”—a very practical person, despite her romantic name—urged him to profitable rapine. Well: his riders were bidden to a trysting-place; and hither, armed in jacks (which are leathern jerkins plated with iron) and mounted on small but active and hardy horses, they repaired at evenfall. The laird and some superior henchmen wore also sleeves of mail and steel bonnets; all had long lances, swords, axes, and in later times such rude firearms—serpentines, half-haggs, harquebusses, currys, cullivers, and hand-guns are mentioned—as were to be had. In the mirk night the reivers crossed the Border; and to do this unseen was no easy matter. The whole line from Berwick to Carlisle was patrolled by setters and searchers, watchers and overseers, having sleuth-hounds to track the invader; also, many folk held lands by the tenure of cornage, and by blowing horns must warn the land of coming raids. Where the frontier line was a river the fords were carefully guarded; those held unnecessary were staked up; narrow passes were blocked in divers ways, so that chief element in Border craft was the knowledge of paths and passes through moorland and moss, and of nooks and coigns of security deep in the mountain glens.
Our party crosses in safety and makes to one of those hidden spots, as near as may be to the scene of action. Here it rests and refreshes itself during the day, and next night it swoops down on its appointed foray. The chief quest was ever cattle, which were eatable and portable. But your moss-trooper was not particular. He took everything inside and outside house and byre. Many lists are preserved of things lifted, whereof one notes a shroud and children’s clothes. A sleuth-hound was a choice prize. Possibly its abduction touched the Borderer’s sense of humour. Scott of Harden, escaping from a raid, with “a bow of kye and a bassen’d (brindled) bull,” passed a trim haystack. He sighed as he thought of the lack of fodder in his own glen. “Had ye but four feet ye should not stand lang there,” he muttered as he hurried onwards. Not to him, not to any rider was it given to tarry by the way, for the dalesmen were not the folk to sit down under outrage. The warder, as he looked from the “Scots gate” of Carlisle castle, and saw the red flame leaping forth into the night from burning homestead or hamlet, was quick to warn the countryside that a reiving expedition was afoot. Even though the prey were lifted unobserved, that only caused a few hours’ delay, and soon a considerable body, carrying a lighted piece of turf on a spear, as a sign, was instant on the invader’s trace. This “following of the fraye” was called “hot-trod,” and was done with hound and horn, and hue and cry. Certain privileges attached to the “hot-trod.” If the offender was caught red-handed he was executed; or, if thrift got the better of rage, he was held to ransom. As early as 1276 a curious case is reported from Alnwick, of a Scot attacking one Semanus, a hermit, and taking his clothes and one penny! Being presently seized, the culprit was beheaded by Semanus in person, who thus recovered his goods and took vengeance of his wrong. A later legend illustrates the more than summary justice that was done. The Warden’s officers having taken a body of prisoners, asked my Lord his pleasure. His Lordship’s mind was “ta’en up wi’ affairs o’ the state,” and he hastily wished the whole set hanged for their untimely intrusion. Presently he was horrified to find that his imprecations had been taken as literal commands, and literally obeyed. Even if the reivers gained their own border, the law of “hot-trod” permitted pursuit within six days of the offence. The pursuer, however, must summon some reputable man of the district entered to witness his proceedings. Nay, the inhabitants generally must assist him—at least, the law said so.