He garr’d the red wine spring on hie.
****
And have they ta’en him, Kinmont Willie,
Against the truce of Border tide?
And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Is keeper here on the Scottish side?
Negociations failing to procure redress, Buccleuch determined to rescue Kinmont himself. In the darkness of a stormy night he and his men stole up to Carlisle, broke the citadel, rescued Kinmont, and carried him off in safety, whilst the English lawyers were raising ingenious technical justifications (you can read them at length in the collection of Border Papers) of the capture. Those same papers show that the ballad gives the main features of the rescue with surprising accuracy. But I cannot linger over its cheerful numbers. The event might once have provoked a war, but the shadow of the Union was already cast. James would do nothing to spoil the splendid prize almost within his grasp, and Elizabeth’s statesmen were not like to quarrel with their future master.
Half a century before the consummation one great cause of discord had been removed. From the junction of the Liddel and Esk to the Solway was known as the Debateable Land, a sort of No-Man’s Land, left in doubt from the time of Bruce. Both nations pastured on it from sunrise to sunset, but in the night any beasts left grazing were lawful prey to the first comer. Enclosures or houses on it could be destroyed or burned without remedy. Apparently the idea was to make it a “buffer State” between the two kingdoms. It was, however, a thorn in the flesh to each, for the Bateables, as the in-dwellers were called, were broken men, and withal the most desperate ruffians on the Border. In 1552 a joint Commission divided the Debateable Land between England and Scotland. The Bateables were driven out, and a dyke was built as boundary line. All the same, here was, for many years, the wildest in the whole wild whirlpool; so that long after the Union, when somebody told King James of a cow which, taken from England to Scotland, had broken loose and got home of itself, the British Solomon was sceptical. It gravelled him, he confessed, to imagine any four-footed thing passing unlifted through the Debateable Land.
With the death of Elizabeth (1603) came the Union of the Crowns, and the Scots riders felt their craft in danger, for they forthwith made a desperate incursion into England, with some idea (it is thought) of staying the event. But they were severely punished, and needs must cower under the now all-powerful Crown. The appointment of effective Wardens presently ceased. In 1606, by the Act 4 Jac. I., cap. 1, the English Parliament repealed the anti-Scots laws, on condition that the Scots Parliament reciprocated; and presently a kindred measure was touched with the sceptre at Edinburgh. The administration of the Border was left to the ordinary tribunals, and the Leges Marchiarum vanished to the Lumber Room.