Walking the Border

by Ian Crofton

  Under Monck’s command the regiment marched north against the Scots, who by then had come out in support of the future Charles II. Having defeated the Scots at Dunbar, the regiment stayed in Scotland until 1st January 1660, when Monck and his men forded the Tweed at Coldstream and marched south to support the restoration of that very same Charles II to the thrones of both countries. Subsequently, Monck’s regiment became known as the Coldstream Guards.

  But the main event of Coldstream’s Civic Week, the event that was going to fill the next day, was the mass ride-out south across the Border to Flodden Field. There, 500 years previously, the largest army that Scotland had ever mustered met with utter disaster.

  One young man every year takes the role of the Coldstreamer, the principal rider, and this 500th anniversary year they hoped he would head up a ride-out of 500 horses.

  To cater for the inundation of visitors, Tweed Green had become a temporary campsite, with a hosepipe and a row of portable loos. The visitors weren’t tourists. They were participants. There was one marquee for ex-Guards, another for former members of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. And there were tents and caravans and mobile homes, many flying flags, all full of drinkers and revellers and riders. Most of them were from other Border towns: Kelso, Hawick, Selkirk, Jedburgh, Duns, Peebles, Galashiels, Langholm. All these towns have their own weeks in which troops of horsemen and horsewomen ride the marches of the burgh. This was traditionally done to mark the territory in which the citizens maintained their privileges against the feudal claims of the local landowners.

  The principals have different names in different towns. In Coldstream he is the Coldstreamer, in Jedburgh the Jeddart Callant, in Kelso the Laddie, in Peebles the Cornet, and so on. In most cases there is also a female principal. On Tweed Green we found ourselves camping next to three ex-principals from Duns, tough women whose ages spanned the generations. They were hard riders, generous with their drink, kind with their advice. They’d wanted to join in the ride-out to Flodden the next day, but there was not a single horse left for hire, they said, anywhere along the Border.

  As we wandered up into the town in the golden evening I said hello to a cat, enjoying the last of the sun. Then the cat’s owner appeared in her doorway, and we talked in a leisurely way of this and that. She was semi-retired, but ran a little shop with her husband.

  I said it felt like Coldstream was a town out of time. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s like Brigadoon. It’s a place that the nastiness of the world has passed by.’ She paused, then added, ‘No one lies here dead three days unnoticed.’

  Interlude: Thursday, 8th August 2013

  ‘Voddy voddy voddy!’

  ‘Oi oi oi!’

  ‘Voddy voddy voddy!’

  ‘Oi oi oi!’

  ‘C’mon, darling! Sing! FUCKIN’ SING!!’

  ‘I’ve got all my love to give . . .’

  ‘More! Louder! FUCKIN’ SING!!!’

  ‘I will survive!’

  ‘More! Louder! FUCKIN’ SING!!!’

  ‘I will survive!!’

  ‘I will survive!!!!’

  I was blasted out of sleep. One o’clock in the morning and the campsite had exploded into life. These Borderers certainly know how to party. It didn’t stop. At least not for another couple of hours. I pulled a T-shirt over my head, but the decibels broke through.

  At one point I stumbled out in the dark to the portaloos for a pee. Three young men in jeans and T-shirts carrying cans stumbled past. ‘Oh, look at him!’ one jeered. ‘He’s all cosy-wosy in his jimmy-jammies!’ If only I was, I thought, tucked up and fast asleep all cosy-wosy in my jimmy-jammies. I might have said I was too old for all this. But half the revellers still up and about were even older than me.

  ‘FUCKIN’ DANCE, GIRLS!!!’

  ‘I . . . SHALL . . . SURVIVE!!!!’

  Eventually someone pulled the plug, and silence fell.

  Later that morning, as the town clock struck ten, I stood dazed and confused in the breeze and sunshine in Coldstream’s Market Square. A crowd had gathered round a cluster of worthies on a ribbon-decked podium. Among them was the Fifteenth Earl of Home, a tall, gaunt man with a smoker’s pallor slouching in a baggy suit with aristocratic ease. Beside him the Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire stood straight as a ramrod in his full dress uniform, sash, sword, medals and all. The Master of Ceremonies at their side was a shorter, plumper man, bespectacled, ruddy, stiff with civic dignity. I presumed he represented the citizenry of the burgh.

  ‘Lord Lieutenant, Lord and Countess of Home, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the MC intoned. He reminded us that if we’d been standing in the same place on 22nd August 1513, dominating the landscape would have been Coldstream’s abbey, and passing through would have been the vanguard of King James’s mighty army, led by Alexander, Second Lord Home, distant ancestor of the present Earl. According to Sir Walter Scott in Marmion, Lord Home was to follow King James’s orders

  And strike three strokes with Scottish brand,

  And march three miles on Southron land,

  And bid the banners of his band

  In English breezes dance.

  ‘Today,’ the MC continued, ‘we go the same three miles on southern land, and our banners will dance to an English breeze. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the colour standard, the Coldstreamer and his Right- and Left-Hand Men.’

  There was a skirl of pipes, and to the tune of ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’ the Coldstreamer and his Right-Hand Man and his Left-Hand Man marched into the square. Dressed in dark blue bonnets and dark blue jackets, white riding breeches and black boots, they sported blue-and-white sashes, the colours of the town. They had the awkward bow-legged gait of men more used to the saddle than the pavement.

  As the pipes fell silent, the Earl of Home cleared his throat.

  ‘Coldstreamer,’ he said in the tones of the effortlessly upper class, ‘I, David the Fifteenth Earl of Home, charge you to lead the cavalcade assembled here in Coldstream today to Flodden Field, as my ancestor did in 1513, there to lay a wreath in homage to the slain of that fateful day. I also charge you to return with a sod of earth cut from the field.’

  This part of the ritual commemorates the role that Isabella of Pringle, Abbess of Coldstream, played in the aftermath of the battle. Hearing of the carnage she ordered her nuns to bear the bodies of the Scottish nobility back from the battlefield to Coldstream Abbey to be given a Christian burial. The sod of earth that the Coldstreamer brings back every year is laid on a stone capital on Tweed Green, one of the few relics of the Abbey that survive.

  ‘Sir,’ the Coldstreamer declared in a broad Border accent as he received the Earl of Home’s standard, ‘I solemnly promise to carry out your charges to the best of my ability.’

  The Countess of Home then pinned a rosette to his lapel.

  The Coldstreamer turned to the crowd and shouted, ‘Hip hip!’

  ‘Hooray!’ the crowd roared back.

  ‘Hip hip!’

  ‘Hooray!’

  ‘Hip hip!’

  ‘Hooray!’

  With that the pipes struck up again and the Coldstreamer and his Right-Hand Man and his Left-Hand Man marched from the square.

  We made our way up the High Street. People were lining up on the pavements, peering towards the west to look out for the approach of the great parade. I asked a shop assistant sitting on her step whether this was Coldstream’s big day. ‘It is, yes,’ she said. ‘This year especially, because of the Battle of Flodden.’ She’d been born in Gateshead and still had a Geordie accent, but had lived in Coldstream for thirty-two years. She said a lot of Geordies ended up there. ‘You get a right mixture in the Borders,’ she said. ‘Which is nice.’

  I asked another woman standing in the entrance of her shop whether everything closed down for half an hour until the horses passed. ‘Not really,’ she said. She was a somewhat taciturn Scouser. But she was as anxious as any to watch the riders go by.

  Outside the Besom pub a young ma
n with shaved ginger hair was clutching a pint. Beside him was a woman in a tracksuit and a child with a dummy in its mouth. ‘Are you locals?’ I asked. ‘Aye,’ said the young man. Then he saw my Dictaphone. ‘No, Ah’m no wanting recorded,’ he told me firmly. ‘Ok,’ I said, ‘I’ll turn it off.’ This vox pop business wasn’t going so well.

  A retired couple proved more forthcoming. They were originally from Yorkshire, but had moved here to be equidistant from one daughter in Leeds and another in Edinburgh. They’d lived in Coldstream for five years.

  ‘The town’s not changed since 1951,’ he said. ‘A strange and mysterious place. How we ended up here I will never know.’

  I mentioned the comment by the woman the previous evening that no one lies here dead three days unnoticed.

  ‘When I drive in over the Tweed Bridge,’ he said, ‘my wife knows I’m home before I do.’

  I asked about the demographic make-up of the town. He told me there was a split. ‘Those who are all related, and the rest of us.’ He thought that almost half the population were now incomers.

  As the pipe band at the head of the procession came into view, I began to offer a commentary to my Dictaphone. ‘A big police four-wheel drive has stopped in the middle of Coldstream high street, and now – ’ The woman in front of me jumped with fright then burst into laughter. She hadn’t expected some idiot to be chuntering into a microphone.

  ‘And now here come a couple of police bikes with flashing lights, and the band and a whole lot of riders following on.’ It was difficult to keep a straight face, but I persisted. ‘The Coldstreamer and his Right-Hand Man and his Left-Hand Man, and then the whole cavalcade coming through. Some in bright waistcoats, some in tweed jackets, some in riding jackets, all in white riding breeches and boots. Some with sashes, some with rosettes. All ages – kids, teens, right up to sixty-somethings, all with a sense of occasion. The women chat companionably. The men keep a stony silence. Here’s four young girls, aged maybe ten, proud and pleased, riding side by side.’

  The town rung with the sound of hooves on tarmac. Rider after rider shouted ‘Hip hip’, and the crowd roared back ‘Hooray!’ There were hundreds and hundreds of riders. It must have taken the best part of half an hour for all of them to pass. Children in the crowd held their noses and pointed and shrieked as horse after horse lifted its tail and shat on the road. The August air filled with the smell of dung.

  If it took five hundred riders half an hour to pass through Coldstream in 2013, how long, 500 years before, would it have taken James IV’s great army of thirty to forty thousand knights, men at arms, pikemen and camp followers to ford the Tweed on 22nd August 1513?

  King James IV, Scotland’s great Renaissance prince, had done all he could to avoid war with England. After all, his queen, Margaret Tudor, was elder sister to Henry VIII of England. But her brother was determined to strut upon the European stage, and to this end joined with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in war against France, Scotland’s traditional ally. For Henry this was the game of kings. He dismissed James’s attempts at diplomacy, blithely stating, ‘I am the very owner of Scotland.’ Such claims had not been heard from an English monarch for 200 years.

  Perhaps unwisely, James felt he had no option other than to launch a diversionary raid across the Border to distract Henry from his French campaign. And so, in the words of William Camden, James ‘marched forward in great courage and greater hope with banner displayed against England’.

  Unusually for a Scottish king, James had the support of virtually all the great magnates of the realm, together with considerable aid, in money and arms, from the French. ‘The Scots lacked nothing necessary for the wars,’ wrote Thomas Ruthal, Bishop of Durham, ‘but only the grace of God.’

  Having forced the surrender of the great English Border fortress at Norham, a few miles down the Tweed from Coldstream, James and his army of perhaps 20,000 fighting men took up a strong position on Branxton Hill, a mile or two northwest of Flodden.

  Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, had led an English army of roughly the same size north to meet the Scottish threat. Surrey, at seventy years old, may have been, as the Scots said, ‘ane cruikit cairll’, but he was a wily commander. Initially Surrey invited James to fight him on level ground to the south, near Milfield. But James sensibly refused to surrender his strong position. So Surrey marched round to the north of the Scottish army, cutting off their line of retreat, and took up position on Stock Law, a lower height beneath Branxton Hill.

  It was 9th September, and the rain fell incessantly. Visibility was poor, made worse by smoke from the campfires. The two armies were only a quarter of a mile apart when they came into view of each other. It was not until late in the afternoon that battle was joined, beginning with an artillery exchange. The Spanish diplomat Pedro de Ayala had observed that James ‘does not think it right to begin any warlike undertaking without being himself the first in danger’. Accordingly, when the guns fell silent, James led his men down the hill through the rain and smoke to fall upon the English army, intent on neutralising the English longbowmen while their bowstrings were still wet.

  In other circumstances the Scottish formations of pikemen – a tactic evolved by Swiss mercenaries – had proved an effective shock weapon. But in this terrain the Scots found their fifteen-foot pikes lacked sufficient versatility. Advancing down a steep slippery slope it was difficult to maintain the right angle and momentum, and when the pike squares reached the lower ground they found themselves bogged down in thick mud, making them vulnerable to the more manoeuvrable billhooks and halberds of the English foot soldiers. With the axes of their weapons the English could chop off the tips of the Scottish spears, while the stabbing blades of the bills outreached the Scottish swords.

  Even so, the Scots fought on determinedly. ‘They were so mighty, large, strong and great men,’ Bishop Ruthal reported, ‘that they would not fall when four or five bills struck on one of them at once.’

  Howbeit, our bills quit them very well, and did more good that day than bows, for they shortly disappointed the Scots of their long spears wherein was their greatest trust: and when they came to hand-strokes, though the Scots fought sore and valiantly with their swords, yet they could not resist the bills, that lighted so thick and sore upon them.

  William Camden picks up the story:

  . . . the fight continued sharp and hot on both parts until the night came upon them, uncertain as then whether [which] side had the victory. But the day ensuing manifested both the conqueror and conquered, and the King of Scots himself, with many a mortal wound, was found among the heaps of dead bodies.

  It turned out to have been a close thing. At the start of the battle Lord Home and the Earl of Huntly had overwhelmed the English right, and James himself had fallen within a spear’s length of where the elderly Earl of Surrey had taken up position to command his forces. But in the end the English victory was absolute.

  No prisoners were taken, no quarter given. Dawn revealed a dreadful sight: Flodden Field was littered with the corpses of ten thousand Scotsmen, and perhaps fifteen hundred English dead. It was said that there was not a family in Scotland that did not lose a son, a husband or a father. As for James himself, according to the English antiquary John Stow, he had suffered ‘divers deadly wounds’,

  . . . his throat cut half asunder, his left hand in two places almost cut off, and many other wounds, as well with arrows as otherwise . . .

  Although the nuns of Coldstream brought back the bodies of the Scottish nobility for burial, there is no record as to what happened to the mass of the dead and wounded. They were no doubt stripped of their arms and armour, and then left naked on the field for the fox and the crow to grow fat on.

  On Stock Law today, near where Surrey oversaw the slaughter and King James fell, there is a monument, in the form of a sturdy cross. On it there is a plaque, which simply states:

  FLODDEN

  1513

  TO THE BRAVE OF BOTH NATIONS

  It w
as here that we awaited the 500 riders. Most of the cars and four-by-fours and the horseboxes and the spectators were up above us, on the top of Branxton Hill. This was a quieter, more poignant spot.

  It was a warm August day, but the sky was busy with clouds manoeuvring to match the drama of the occasion. It was a day of long views, long memories. In this fine summer the corn had already been cut in Flodden Field, leaving a clear run of stubble for the 500 horses.

  There was a quiet expectation among the two score spectators around the cross, their words whipped away by the breeze. After a few minutes someone made out a movement along the hedge-lined lane below. We saw the horses before we heard them. Five hundred horses clattered on tarmac, huffing and blowing, then the cries of marshals brought the procession to a standstill. A marshal dismounted, opened the double gate into the field of stubble, into Flodden Field.

  There was a dip in the hill below us, a steepening, so the riders were hidden for a while after they came through the gate. Then suddenly they reappeared, charging up the hill over the near horizon towards us. At their head was the Coldstreamer, banner flying. Close behind came his Right-Hand Man and his Left-Hand Man.

  Hundreds more followed, some on their own, some in small troops, some walking, some trotting, some of the friskier ones taking a quick canter. Then they mustered beyond the cross, at the foot of Branxton Hill, in the level ground where most of the Scots had been slaughtered. Five hundred riders seemed to fill the field. It was impossible to imagine what that same field would have looked like five hundred years before, littered with the bodies of ten or twelve thousand dead or dying men.

  I followed after the riders, puffing up a path through a steep field of barley to watch the climax of the day. The five hundred massed in the lane by the ruins of Branxton Stead. Then the Coldstreamer and his Right-Hand Man and his Left-Hand Man set off at a gallop diagonally up the final grassy slope of Branxton Hill, while the crowd above roared with approval. More and more gallopers followed, the crowds cheering wildly. The horses waiting their turn grew restless, turning this way and that, snorting. Their riders, under orders from the mounted marshals, worked hard to hold them back until their turn came. The ground shook, the air was beaten with the blows of hooves. The biggest cheers of all were reserved for the last rider – a young lad of only six or seven, on a small white pony. I don’t suppose he’ll ever forget the roars of the crowd that day.