The True and Ancient Border
Settling in to a new place is always complicated by the perception of time. Immediate concerns compete with a long-familiar past and an unfathomable future, but the new world has its own time scale to which the incomer has to adjust. I wanted to know, not just where the nearest post office was and when the buses ran, but where we were in historical time and space. The border was the boundary line of half our property and I felt that it was as important to find out exactly what it represented and how it had come to be as it was to locate the stopcock and to plumb the mysteries of the heating system.
The answers, of course, might turn out to be trivial and obvious. The accent divide, for instance, is probably quite recent. Local children have the accent of their primary school: pupils at Bewcastle School sound English while pupils at Newcastleton School, six miles away in Scotland, sound Scottish. Before compulsory education to the age of fourteen, there seems to have been very little difference in the speech of Scottish and English borderers. The vernacular of the Border characters of Walter Scott and John Buchan could be voiced just as well by a Cumbrian or a Northumbrian as by a Lowland Scot.
To some urban Scots, the border might stand for a cultural and historical chasm, but to the local population, it is primarily an administrative nuisance. People in need of a hospital who live less than fifteen miles from Carlisle but on the Scottish side of the border are forced to travel twice that distance to Dumfries Infirmary. No modern borderer would think that the national frontier was something worth dying for.
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In a place where geological forces can be seen at work every day in the boulder clay which slithers off the slopes and the river which carries it away, historical time contracts. On a local time scale, the national border itself is recent. Before the Romans, there were tribal divisions which I assumed to be untraceable. The Romans then created their own temporary borders as they moved north through Britain. When the Romans departed, the British tribes established or restored their own frontiers.
The muddle of those Dark Age kingdoms is sometimes tidily represented on speculative maps purporting to show the outlines of Bernicia, Deira, Rheged, Strathclyde, Northumbria and Cumbria. While nationalists, regionalists and genealogists in search of historical homelands find such maps evocative and convincing, historians tend to be more philosophical about the gaps in the record. A professor of Medieval History who visited us not long after we moved in was amazed to discover, as he drove up through Cumbria and saw road signs to the gigantic ‘Rheged’ visitor centre near Penrith, that the location of that unlocatable and perhaps fictitious sixth-century kingdom had been so confidently identified.
None of those shifting borders appear to match the future Anglo-Scottish border: the kingdoms of Northumbria and Cumbria encompassed lands on either side. Assuming that the political boundaries of Dark Age kingdoms reflected cultural or linguistic differences, place names might provide more tangible clues than early medieval poems celebrating the exploits of legendary leaders. But the place names of Liddesdale are the jumbled residue of centuries of invasion and settlement. Within half an hour of home, there are hills which form part of the same small range but whose names are derived from several different languages: Cumbric (an extinct form of Celtic), Old English, Old Norse, Middle English and Scots.
The first sign that any part of the future border was used as a frontier comes from the mid-ninth century: according to later traditions, Kenneth MacAlpin, the Pictish king who is popularly considered to be the first king of Scotland, claimed land as far south as the river Tweed. The Tweed still forms most of the border from Carham to the North Sea – eighteen miles of river, plus a five-mile deviation called the Bounds of Berwick. Scottish possession of lands north of the Tweed was confirmed by the Battle of Carham in 1018. In the west, Carlisle and the kingdom of Cumbria also came under Scottish rule, which explains why Carlisle belonged to the diocese of Glasgow.
In 1092, William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, made Cumbria an English colony. Although Carlisle changed hands again more than once, the border as it now exists was effectively set. On-the-ground details are lacking until 1245, when a Northumbrian knight called Hugh de Bolbec sent a letter to Henry III of England, describing an apparently futile meeting which had taken place on Friday, 13 October at Reddenburn near Carham on the Tweed.
To resolve a boundary dispute between two estates, the King had ordered the eastern marches to be settled ‘as they were in the time of King John and his predecessors’. Six knights were chosen by each side to walk along the line separating England from Scotland. The six English knights confidently traced ‘the true and ancient divisions and marches between the two kingdoms’, while the six Scottish knights ‘dissented and contradicted’ at every step.
The first walk having failed to produce agreement, six more knights were appointed by each side, making two parties of twelve (‘for greater security’, the letter explained) and the process was repeated. The freshly harvested fields of the Tweed Valley now saw twenty-four knights, with their servants and men-at-arms, processing along the border line. Once again, the Scottish knights voiced their unanimous disagreement. The ‘true and ancient’ boundary was proving elusive. Despite this second failure, doggedness prevailed over diplomacy and another twelve knights were sworn in on either side.
This time, before the forty-eight knights strode forth, the English took the precaution of declaring ‘on oath’ that the true border ran from the confluence of Reddenburn and Tweed south to Tres Karras and Hoperichelawe (no longer identifiable) and then in a straight line to Witelawe (White Law hill, on the main watershed of the Cheviot Hills).* But as they set off along an increasingly muddy border line, the leaders of the Scottish contingent turned aggressive, ‘opposing with force and impeding the perambulation with threats’, whereupon the English, perhaps having no further knights to hand in that northern extremity, ‘firmly asserted that the places aforementioned were the true and ancient marches and divisions’.
Hugh de Bolbec sent his report to Henry III, and since the Scots had apparently acted out of pure mischief, the ‘ancient’ border remained where it had already been for several generations. If either side had cause for complaint, it would have been the English rather than the Scots. Some time between 1018 and 1245, Scotland had acquired a great deal of land south of the Tweed, but the English never tried to push the border back to the north. A similar perambulation took place in 1246. After that, except for local disputes over fishing rights and the occasional English field sown with Scottish wheat, the border appeared to be fixed for all time. The significant exceptions were the Bounds of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which was captured by the English in 1482, and the Debatable Land in the west, the extraordinary nature of which would never be fully recognized by either side, then or since.
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This surprisingly persistent border between two rival nations is probably the oldest national land boundary in Europe. Pre-modern borders are sometimes said to have been zones rather than lines, but each frontier has its own peculiarities. Most of the Anglo-Scottish border was defined as precisely as on a modern map. Not until the age of motorways, when tarmac and speed turned physical geography into an esoteric branch of historical investigation, was it described as ‘arbitrary’.
It followed streams and rivers, ran over named passes and peaks, and along the main watershed of the Cheviot Hills: the Chevyotte ‘mounteyne’ (or range), a survey of 1542 explained, ‘devydethe England and Scotland by the heighte of yt as the water descendeth and falleth’. This might account for the southward dip of the line after Carham: the southern limits of the Tweed catchment area rather than the Tweed itself were taken as the border. It threaded onto a remarkably consistent diagonal a hundred-mile-long sequence of traditional, perhaps prehistoric meeting or ‘trysting’ places, where cross-border affairs were discussed (fig. 1). In the few sections where nature became vague, it was marked by field boundaries, dykes, crosses, ancient oaks, standing stones and cairns, and, in one part, by just over a mile of Roman road. As the land dropped down towards the Solway, it continued on the same diagonal by following the Kershope Burn, the Liddel and then the Esk.
The natural logic of the border is, paradoxically, a sign of its bureaucratic origin. In later centuries, colonial committees would draw straight lines on maps and then transfer them to the ground. In the Middle Ages, lacking accurate maps, administrators used the straight lines provided by nature. In theory, no one could quarrel with a river or a watershed line, and, apart from the disputatious knights and a few invasive ploughmen, no one did. The only serious deviation of the line occurred more than six hundred years after the knights’ perambulation in what must be the most obscure episode in Anglo-Scottish history.
Contradicting all previous maps and the knights of Henry III, the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1859 moved the border half a mile to the east, leaving White Law and the high moors of Yetholm Common well inside Scotland. On the second edition of the map (1896), without any explanation and, it seems, without anyone ever noticing, the border returned to White Law. No doubt this had something to do with the gypsies who camped on Yetholm Common and who owed allegiance to neither nation, but this sudden, brief wavering of the line also suggests that, by then, the meanderings of the border mattered as little to human beings as they did to birds of prey.
Three years after moving to Cumbria, I began to compile a catalogue of cols and passes and found the borderlands to be one of the most scantily mapped areas of the British Isles. Several of the passes mentioned in sixteenth-century lists of the ‘ingates and passages forth of Scotland’ have disappeared from the map though not, of course, from the landscape. The physical separation of the two nations was evidently a subject of such indifference that the highest mountain on the border has lost its original name (Windgate Fell) and acquired another (Windy Gyle), which was never the name of a mountain.
One section of the border, however, mattered a great deal to the people who lived along it in the Middle Ages and long before. Near its south-western terminus, it split into two, describing an area known as the Debatable Land. Here, the line became a zone and the border acquired a third dimension. Not only was this bulge of unclaimed territory anomalous, its northern and western boundaries were also a frontier of a different kind: it was impossible to recognize them simply by looking at the landscape.
This relic of a distant age was more minutely described in documents than the rest of the border, and it stretched so far back in time that it was already ancient when the forty-eight knights of England and Scotland nearly came to blows on the banks of the Tweed. These boundaries survived because they remained engraved in the minds of the local people. Yet to the medieval officials who policed the border, the Debatable Land was synonymous with anarchy. Somehow, that enclave of lawlessness overrun by murderous savages with no respect for private property had retained its intricate contours.
Since this was also the boundary of our property and a manageably small area for exploration, I decided to find out all I could about the people who had unexpectedly preserved the integrity of the Debatable Land. I knew that Carlisle had a reputable museum, built on the site of a Roman fort. It seemed a good place to start. After a month on the border, I had made only one brief return trip to the capital of Cumbria, and I was quite ready now to think of it as a city.
For three mornings in a row, there was a hard frost. Since the roads were icy, I decided to try out what remained of public transport. But on the fourth morning, we woke to a brilliant covering of deep snow. Local radio on both sides of the border announced the closure of schools and the cancellation of buses. No tyre tracks would spoil the whiteness which surrounded the house. In a city, the silence after a heavy fall of snow has a softening effect, but in a place which is normally peaceful, it suggests a hesitation of nature, a holding of breath rather than repose. It took a few moments to realize that what gave the silence its air of imminence was the fact that the river, too, had been hushed and that thin sheets of ice were inching out from the opposite bank.