by Graham Robb
Little was her stature, but muckle was her fame.
Upon the English loons she laid monie thumps,
An’ when her legs were cuttit off, she fought upon her stumps.
In this relentlessly masculine world, one document stands out. In 1583, Thomas Musgrave, the Captain of Bewcastle, provided the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, with a long list of the ‘lawless people’ living in and around the Debatable Land. His purpose was to acquaint his superior with all ‘the riders and ill doers both of England and Scotland’ and to give him a working knowledge of the social geography of Liddesdale and Eskdale. To that end, he included details of the reivers’ ‘dwellings and alliances’. Although women are mentioned only implicitly and without their Christian names – ‘Hobb Foster of Kyrsope Leys marryed Will Fosters daughter of Grena in Liddisdaill’ – the result is a marital atlas which proves that rampaging bands of reivers were not the only dynamic force in Anglo-Scottish society.
When each bride’s journey from her place of birth to her husband’s home is plotted on a map (fig. 3), the national border disappears like a track though a mire. Far from being exceptional, cross-border marriages were the norm. A Scottish Romeo did not have to brave the wrath of his family to court an English Juliet, nor did the Juliets have to travel very far. The average distance covered by the brides is under six miles. When Miss Foster looked down from her childhood home on the slopes of Greena Hill, she could see the roofs of her husband’s house at the confluence of the Kershope and the Liddel. The border was no greater impediment to these couples than it is to the woodpeckers which feed in England and fly back across the Liddel to their Scottish nests. As Thomas Musgrave put it at the end of his letter to William Cecil in 1583: ‘Thus your lordshipe may see the vewe of our lawles people . . . they are a people that wilbe Scottishe when they will, and Englishe at theire pleasure’.
When James VI in 1604 celebrated ‘the blessed union or rather reuniting of these two mighty famous and ancient kingdoms of England and Scotland’, he might have been describing the land along the Liddel and the Esk: ‘the isle within itself hath almost none but imaginary bounds of separation . . . making the whole a little world within itself’.
These marriages were not contracted in naive ignorance of the political reality. A storm cloud hung over every Liddesdale wedding feast: without special permission, cross-border marriages were punishable by death. This was not an idle legal deterrent. In 1587, a young Scotsman, whose English wife had given birth to their child two months before, was arrested by the Scottish warden. In full knowledge of the consequences for his compatriot, the warden handed him over to the English authorities. A few days later, husband and wife saw each other for the last time when they were hanged, one beside the other, in the market place at Haltwhistle.
This was the tight web of kinship, occasionally frayed and torn but as tough as a reiver’s jack, which survived three centuries of war and then, when peace had returned to the borderlands, another half century of brutal state repression. The borderers, who seemed to be the survivors of a distant era, were in this respect ahead of their time. Many couples living in and around the Debatable Land today joined hands across the border, travelling no more than a few miles, from Penton to Harelaw, from Harelaw to Roadhead or from Bewcastle to Newcastleton. When the map of cross-border marriages (fig. 3) was shown to passengers on the 127 bus, several of them could mention long-married couples to whom the border meant as little as it had done to their lawless ancestors.
18
The Final Partition
After the death of Henry VIII in 1547, a nine-year-old boy sat on the throne of England and a four-year-old girl on the throne of Scotland. The Rough Wooing had failed to secure the betrothal of Edward VI and Mary Stuart. By the autumn of 1548, Mary was safely in France, betrothed to the Dauphin, son of King Henri II. When they married, the kingdoms of Scotland and France would be united. The French were already taking a lively interest in border affairs. In September 1550, one of William Dacre’s spies reported that the French were urging the Scots not to cede any ground to England and to maintain the neutrality of the Debatable Land. They were offering to pay for the defence of the ‘batable land’ – ‘wherein I perceive the Scots take great courage’.
That small area bounded by the Liddel and the Sark now found itself at the heart of European politics. It was a potential bridgehead of French power on England’s northern frontier. If Mary died, English borderers might be looking over to a land that was governed from the European continent. Military force began to yield to diplomacy. The Debatable Land took pride of place in the opening paragraphs of the peace treaty which was signed in June 1551. Only then, when its ancient sanctity had been irreparably defiled, was its usefulness fully recognized.
It is covenanted, concorded and concluded that the Land variable, common of both the People, called the Debateable Ground, which lieth between the West Marches of England and Scotland . . . shall remain . . . even as it hath been accustomed to be, and was before the beginning of the Wars.
The present occupants of the Debatable Land were to be allowed to stay in their houses until Michaelmas, which gave them three months to ‘remove themselves, their wives and children, goods and cattle’ and all their other ‘things’, each into his own country. This vain aspiration shows that the document was drawn up by men who had never tried to flush a reiver out of his den.
Though the peace treaty of 1551 has been described as a milestone on the road to Anglo-Scottish union, it was primarily an acknowledgement of the damage caused by the war. This was not the solution to an intractable problem but an attempt to restore the peaceful realm which had existed between the two kingdoms for centuries. It came far too late. The first generation to be born in the Debatable Land had reached maturity and showed no sign of packing up to leave. At the end of 1551, the Scottish warden, the sixth Lord Maxwell, burned and depopulated the Debatable Land one more time and killed several of the Grahams, but by then, both sides knew that the ancient enclave had ceased to exist and that there remained only the crude expedient of drawing a line on the ground and dividing the Debatable Land in two.
The idea of partition had first been proposed by the Scots in 1510 but never followed up. Drawing a line across the Debatable Land proved to be extremely complicated. In London, clerks were sent deep into the archives but – after what must have been a cursory search – could find nothing ‘in any of the Treaties with Scotland’ concerning ‘the Debatable and Canonbie’. There would have to be much ‘perusing of olde writinges and examinacion of old men’. Reliable information would be hard to obtain from the crafty bandits who had overrun the Debatable Land and who would lie about their entitlements. As local landowners, the wardens themselves were scarcely impartial. ‘In dede’, the Privy Councillors sagely noted in February 1551, ‘the lesse pryvey the Borderers be made to the devision hereof, the more likely it is the thing shall take place.’ Instead, the commissioners would be forced to seek out illiterate farmers in their cottages and cowsheds and try to make sense of their barbaric dialect.
Then there was the matter of the conference itself. Commissioners would have to be despatched from Westminster at ‘muche charge and trouble . . . the place being hence so farre distant’. Since there should be equal numbers on both sides, the Scots would have to be prevented from sending a whole parliament of delegates from Edinburgh. The location was discussed repeatedly until, in April 1552, someone who must have seen too many meetings dissolve into inconclusiveness hit upon the perfect venue. The commissioners would meet on the sands in the middle of the Solway Firth at low tide. All around would be the watercolour emptiness of the shallow sea, the clouded peaks of the Cumbrian mountains to the south and, to the north, the sprawling grey pyramid of the mountain called Criffel which seems distant even when approached. There, amid the piping of the oystercatchers, the commissioners would discuss the fate of the Debatable Land and the contours of the two countries’ new western border while the sands trickled away between thei
r feet in widening gullies, the flocks rose up and the tide came rushing in.
*
In the end, the key to the division of the Debatable Land was not the final meeting, which took place on the dividing line itself in September 1552, but the ‘juste and true’ map that was created for the occasion by an English master mason, Henry Bullock (plate 14 and fig. 4). This astonishingly accurate map was the result of the first official expedition into the Debatable Land which did not have the aim of laying waste to it. Though it looks like the drawing of an imaginary realm, with its exotic place names and unknown rivers winding through a darkly shaded, almost desolate realm, this is the document that was used to divide the Debatable Land between England and Scotland and to establish the new national border. A generation before landowners understood the point of having maps drawn of their estates, Bullock’s ‘platt’ must have been a revelation. That secret domain was suddenly unveiled by the magic of cartography like a landscape illuminated by a full moon.
Some of the sites on Bullock’s map are unrecorded anywhere else: Notebery Hill, Toplyff Hill and Petmen Hill are now anonymous features in the lumpy uplands north-west of Canonbie. Many other names are spelled in an antiquated fashion which suggests the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries rather than the sixteenth. This would normally indicate copying from an earlier map, but there were no earlier maps and we know that this was the fruit of an exhaustive, on-the-ground survey, so diligently executed that the expense accounts submitted to the Lord High Treasurer include a claim for a horse that was ‘burstit of his ryding with the commissioneris at the Debatable land’.
The speech of the ‘old men’ who alone knew the fields and hills to which their ancestors had always led their livestock had preserved the ancient forms, just as local pronunciation does today: Carby Hill is ‘Caerby Hill’, Carlisle is ‘Caerl’, Liddesdale is ‘Lid-des-dale’ in three syllables. In a land untouched by administrators, the Norse, Brittonic20 and Celtic tongues were still alive. ‘Tardwoth’ and ‘Torbrack’ would have been recognizable to a Viking; ‘Rocley’ and ‘Greateney’ contain the Old Norse ‘ey’ (‘island’), from the days when the high tide cut Gretna and Rockcliffe off from the mainland.
No account has survived of this small but momentous journey of discovery into the British interior at the dawn of the colonial age, but traces of the expedition can be deduced from the technicalities of the map. Though it stands on the edge of the Debatable Land, the mound labelled ‘the Mote of Liddall’ lies close to the centre. Here, the four compass lines intersect. A tower had been built on the ruins of the ancient castle. It had probably collapsed by the time the map-makers arrived, but even two centuries later, in 1772, when the Welsh scholar Thomas Pennant visited the Borders, the castle mound on the cliff above the Liddel commanded ‘a vast extent of view’ (almost impossible to imagine today in the neglected woods of Netherby). From there, ‘the country might be explored to very great advantage’.
Liddel Moat would have been the initial vantage point chosen by Bullock for his survey. It offered sightlines to four other prominent sites which could be used for calibration or as secondary survey points: Harper Hill above the river Lyne, the tower on Arthuret Knoll (long since quarried away), the triangular peak of Tinnis Hill above the ‘Standyng stane’ and, in the flatlands along the river Sark, the tower of Sandy Armstrong (son of ‘Ill Will’ and father of Kinmont Willie), which enjoyed surprisingly broad views to the east, especially once English soldiers had burned down all the woods.
When Bullock and his men rode up to the door of the old reiver in the spring of 1552 carrying plane tables and theodolites instead of guns and torches, Sandy Armstrong must have seized the opportunity to assert his dubious claims. A year and a half before, he and his ‘associates’ had been counted ‘faithfull subjectes’ of the English king: against two thousand Scots and four hundred Frenchmen, he had defended his tower in the usual way, filling it up with slow-burning peat and making it impossible for the assailants to lay their gunpowder charges. But now he was threatening to transfer his allegiance to Scotland and may well have developed a sudden interest in cartography. For Bullock, the reiver’s intimate knowledge of his misappropriated domain would have been a priceless aid: the practice of alerting neighbours to danger by lighting beacons on the rooftops of pele towers would have provided him with a list of mutually visible points from which to take his sightings.21
*
Apart from the map, the only lasting souvenir of the 1552 survey is the new section of border known as the March Bank in Scotland and the Scots’ Dike in England. Two teams of labourers – one English, one Scottish – dug parallel ditches from the Sark to the Esk. The earth was piled up in the middle to form an embankment dividing one part of the Debatable Land from the other. Square stones carved with the arms of England and Scotland were to be placed at either end. These historic monuments are occasionally ‘rediscovered’ when a walker stumbles on one of the later unmarked boundary stones, but they probably never existed, except as drawings on Bullock’s map. The Privy Council found it hard enough to make local people contribute to the cost of the ‘diche’ without contemplating the expense of an English or Scottish stonemason. One treaty refers only to ‘groves and holes’ made by the commissioners.
The Scots’ Dike is now a three-and-a-half-mile-long barrier of trees – coniferous in Scotland, deciduous in England – running from Reamy Rigg (or Craw’s Knowe) on the river Sark to the March Bank Hotel on the A7. Walkers who mistake the dotted line on the map for a footpath or who deliberately set out to walk along the border between England and Scotland know the Scots’ Dike as a muddy, brambly, ankle-twisting exercise in futility. Trampled by animals, strangled by vegetation, its ditches clogged, re-cut and redirected by generations of farmers, the embankment was eventually wrecked by a descendant of the Duke of Buccleuch who planted it with trees and extracted the timber by dragging it behind a locomotive.
The dike is usually assumed to be a testament to Anglo-Scottish strife rather than to the collaboration of the two colonial powers. This would explain why so many false tales have attached themselves to this shambolic monument like burrs and brambles to a walker’s clothing. According to one tale, the two teams of dike diggers started at opposite ends and failed by twenty-one feet to meet in the middle. In reality, the western half of the line describes an arc, not because the diggers were uncoordinated, but because they were avoiding marshy ground. There was no attempt to create a perfect obstacle: the dike was symbolic, not strategic.
The Scots were determined to retain Canonbie; the English wanted control of a low ridge called Blackbank which overlooked a useful landing place near the mouth of the Esk; otherwise, neither side was much concerned by the loss or gain of a few acres. Another Scots’ Dike fable claims that the French ambassador to England was brought in to make peace between the two squabbling nations: the English drew a line on the map; the greedy Scots drew a second line, much farther to the south. Then the ambassador – with what a recent writer calls ‘Gallic rigour’ (not a quality much associated with the French in 1552) – diplomatically drew a line between the two.
The ambassador’s line was never adopted. Bullock’s map shows a fourth line, captioned ‘the last and fynal Lyne of the particion’ (fig. 5). This corresponds to the actual Scots’ Dike which forms the border. On the map, its logic is obvious. In the east, it consigns the tower of ‘Tom Greme’ (Thomas Graham) to England; in the west, it joins the river Sark just south of the tower of ‘Sandy Armestr.’ (Armstrong), making the petty domain of that unreliable reiver indisputably Scottish. Some years later, for no known reason, the border line dipped abruptly to the south-west, adding an extra twenty acres to Scotland and, perhaps more to the point, enlarging the domain of Sandy Armstrong’s successors.
This separation of Grahams and Armstrongs was one of the main purposes of the new border. It is often said that the Scots grabbed the lion’s share of the disputed territory, yet everyone could see from the map that the S
cottish portion was more than twice the size of the English. Since the Debatable Land was a source of endless trouble and very little revenue, this unequal division was not necessarily to the advantage of the Scots. The crucial point was that the Debatable Land had ceased to exist as an independent territory. Each nation could now legally lay waste to its own portion of it, and peace would at last descend on the country between Scotland and England.
19
Hector of ye Harlawe
The ‘dykes and ditches of the Debatable Land’ were finally constructed some time after March 1553. No doubt they were greeted with the same sarcastic hilarity with which expensive public works are often greeted today. The border barrier was no more effective than Carlisle’s modern flood defences. That year, the English received almost five hundred ‘complaints’ from the Scots detailing ‘incursions, murders, burnings, mutilations and spoils’ committed by ‘English’ reivers. The list included men who were now nominally Scottish – Hector of Harelaw, Geordie Armstrong of Cadgill and ‘the young laird of Gretna’ – but who had remained defiantly unaligned.
The new Scottish commissioner, Richard Maitland, who was appointed to settle cross-border disputes, wrote poetry in his spare time and found plenty of ‘burning and slaying’ to occupy his muse. ‘The common thieves of Liddesdale’ were still making off with ‘spindles, spoons and spits, / Beds, bolsters, blankets, sarks and sheets’:
Thay leif richt nocht, quhairever thay ga,
Thair can na thing be hid thame fra.22
Meanwhile, more practical steps were being taken to brand the men who ‘broke’ the new border. The accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland record the purchase, in September 1553, of ‘ane byrnyng irne to byrn the thevis of Lyddisdale on the cheik’.
On the English side, all three marches were placed under the command of a Warden-general. The first post-holder was John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. The Dacre family had fallen into disfavour. The old autocrats of the north who used the upland tribes as a private army were to be replaced by men with closer connections to the Crown. The new deputy warden-general of the three marches was Thomas Wharton, a hard-nosed, war-loving bureaucrat-soldier who had routed the Scots at the Battle of Solway Moss.