Harrowed
I had planned the trip to the Queen’s Mire out of simple curiosity, having no thought of writing a book about the region in which we happened to have found a home. One of its attractions was its emptiness, in time as well as space. Queen Mary’s expedition to the Hermitage seemed to be the only connection with the highways of British history. It was a reminder that the great events which would form the modern nation had all taken place elsewhere – the political and dynastic struggles, the English and Scottish Reformations, the first developments of an empire.
But in that emptiness lay an invitation or a challenge. Beyond a ridge that was no more distant than the horizon of a child’s world, I had seen an unsuspected realm within the borderlands. Beneath the bog, there had been a road which joined towns in the north to the valley which slopes down to the Irish Sea. The few texts I had read for the trip suggested that the historical irrelevance of border society was an illusion, just as the moorland had seemed devoid of life until a plover or a curlew shot up from its nest.
In the writings of Bishop Lesley and Walter Scott, I had the first inklings of a world with a history of its own. Though it was too exceptional in many ways to serve the purposes of general historians, it belonged to the history of Britain. It might even call into question the coherence and completeness of that history. The borderers had been considered important only in so far as they could be conscripted as footnotes into the national narrative. Serious misconceptions had resulted: the notion that a borderer must have been, at heart, either English or Scottish and that the Debatable Land was the unviable remnant of an otherwise extinct world. But it was the other great divide in British society – between Catholic and Protestant – which first opened a door into that world and showed how much persistence and luck it would take to recover it.
In apparent contradiction of the ghastly facts, Bishop Lesley had asserted in 1578 that a reiver never wilfully shed the blood of his opponents,
. . . for they have a persuasion that all property is common by the law of nature, and is therefore liable to be appropriated by them in their necessity, but that murder and other injuries are prohibited by the Divine law. . . . They think the art of plundering so very lawful, that they never say their prayers more fervently, or have more devout recurrence to the beads of their rosaries, than when they have made an expedition, as they frequently do, of forty or fifty miles, for the sake of booty.
The Roman Catholic bishop’s unexpected portrait of devout and principled reivers has often been dismissed as a deliberate lie. George MacDonald Fraser, understandably incensed by romantic portrayals of those homicidal ‘merry men’, found the bishop’s account suspect in the extreme and wondered whether Lesley himself had taken part in a raid . . . One of Lesley’s main sources was his friend, Mary Queen of Scots, whom Fraser considered equally suspect, both as a woman and as a Catholic: ‘In our time, she would probably have been a highly successful fashion model and jet setter’, but ‘her perception and handling of affairs was on a par with her taste in men, which was deplorable’.
The bishop’s error was one of interpretation rather than fact. Assuming that adherence to a moral precept must inevitably be religious, he misconstrued the reivers’ code of honour as an expression of Christian faith. Walter Scott’s informed opinion was that, if the borderers ‘remained attached to the Roman Catholic faith rather longer than the rest of Scotland’, this was probably the result of ‘total indifference upon the subject’. The reivers were neither Catholic nor Protestant nor even, in an orthodox sense, religious. For a reiver, the greatest disgrace was not excommunication but ostracism: if a man failed to keep his word, one of his gloves or a picture of his face was stuck on the end of a spear or a sword and paraded about at public meetings. This ‘bauchling’ was considered a punishment worse than death.
The Great Monition of Cursing (here), which was written to be recited from pulpits throughout the Borders, would have fallen on deaf ears if it fell on any ears at all. Reivers occasionally burned churches along with barns and cow sheds, while priests and curates, or people claiming to be such, took part in raids. The only sign that reivers attended religious ceremonies is an unconfirmed report that the right hand of a male child was held during baptism so that, untouched by holy water, it would be able to ‘deal the more deadly or “unhallowed” blows to its enemies’.
As everywhere else, there was a belief in fairies, witches and ghosts, and in the efficacy of magic wells and potions. There was either no concern about the fate of the soul after death, or no understanding of a minister’s purpose. One of the few men who tried to convert the heathen northerners, in the 1560s and 70s, might just as well have been a missionary in a foreign land:
[Bernard] Gilpin did preach at a church in Redesdale where there was neither minister, nor bell, nor book, but one old book which was set forth in King Edward’s time, and an old psalter torn to pieces, and he sent the clerk to give warning he would preach. In the meantime there came a man riding to the church style [the churchyard gate] having a dead child laid before him over his saddle crutch, and cried to Mr. Gilpin, not knowing him, ‘Come, parson, and do the cure’, and laid down the corpse and went his way.
The borderers’ beliefs seem on the whole to have tended to the practical. Several local people have told me that, in the days of the reivers, only the women were buried in consecrated ground. The existence of female-only graveyards is considered plausible because a man is always more likely to be seen tippling in a pub than kneeling in a church. This shows the unreliability of what is loosely termed ‘oral history’. Most local people have read at least one book on the reivers, and several books recount the traditional tale of a visitor to Bewcastle who, remarking on a curious (but unattested) dearth of men’s names on the gravestones, was told by an old woman, ‘Oh, Sir, they’re a’ buried at that weary Caerl’ – meaning that all the men had ended up on the gallows in that confounded (‘weary’) city of Carlisle.
*
A stone slab inside the entrance of the Armstrongs’ pele tower at Hollows (here), known as ‘the dead stone’, is said to cover the tomb of several Armstrongs, though the thresholds of other towers are believed to conceal the remains of enemies, placed there so that they would be trampled on every day. I despaired of finding any real evidence of this pagan practice until, one afternoon, I was cycling along a quiet back road near a boundary of the Debatable Land.
For some distance ahead, the entire width of the road was filled by a flock of sheep. The flock had divided itself into two contingents: the able-bodied had clip-clopped on ahead while the sick and the lame, some of whose relatives were already rotting in the hedgerow, hobbled along so slowly that the sheepdog was able to perform two functions at once, spraying every gatepost and returning in time to chivvy the invalids.
The owner of the sheep apologized for the delay. As we waited for the animals to progress, we talked about the weather and the landscape. He pointed to a farm in the middle distance:
‘That’s mine,’ he said.
It was the first time I had seen the place, though its name was familiar from a sixteenth-century map which shows it as the site of a stone house or a pele tower, and so I asked, ‘Wasn’t there a tower there once upon a time?’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘there used to be a water tower in that field, but it wasn’t needed any more.’
‘Before that, I mean. Wasn’t there a pele tower or something?’
His eyes lit up. ‘The reivers! Aye, there was – and it’s us that found it! We was puttin’ in a new door, but the wall was that thick you couldn’t drill through it . . . They had to be careful in them days, didn’t they? People comin’ to steal the sheep and a’ that.’
He paused, then continued in a conspiratorial tone, talking to a stranger on a bicycle who was probably a tourist passing through the region: ‘We found somethin’ else as well . . . ’
‘What was that?’
‘Bodies! All lined up one aside t’other.’
‘Aye, but not exactly bodies. Skellingtons, y’know, from back then. Naught but banes.’
A few years before, the ploughman had turned up a burial where no chapel had ever stood and stopped the tractor to show the farmer. He pointed out the place to me: ‘Up yonder, in front o’ the house.’
‘And is that known?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you report it?’
He had the gleeful, slightly guilty expression of someone who has got the better of the authorities.
‘Well, y’know ’ow the police can be aboot such things . . . ’
‘Mm, yes,’ I lied. ‘So what did you do?’
He looked around at the empty fields as though a constable might be concealed in a ditch or watching from a bush, and then, with raised eyebrows and teeth bared in a grin, said, in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘I harrowed them under!’
Perhaps noticing something in my expression, he added, in order to excuse himself or to invite me to join him in the historical joke, ‘Onyways, it was prob’ly Armstrongs from ower there, come to steal the sheep!’
By the time I reached home an hour later, I knew that something would have to be written about this neglected region where nature and humans conspired to destroy the evidence of the past. In the weeks that followed, I discovered the great treasure of border history in the archives of the Scottish and English border officers, and those empty landscapes began to be populated with identifiable individuals.
Only the stone footings of their towers remained, the people themselves had been illiterate and many of their ballads had probably been written by Walter Scott or professional balladeers, but the thousands of documents preserved in the State Papers of Scotland, England and France were a stupendously detailed record of that dark age of British history. There were minute accounts of reiving expeditions and official raids conducted by the wardens; there were verbal ‘maps’ describing the location of every hidden settlement and reiver’s lair; there were the reports of spies and diplomats, the letters of kings and queens, cries for help from the beleaguered frontier and disquisitions on the ancient laws and customs of the Borders.
Historians had plundered those records for examples of the chaos and the moral vacuum which seemed to be caused by the lack of central government, but in that medieval Babel of squabbling, frightened, laughing and sinister voices, a world came to life with its own battles, feuds and dynasties, its peculiar patterns of settlement and internal migration, its history and legends, and even its own laws. And at the heart of that world was something stranger than even the best-informed wardens had suspected: a land incalculably older than Scotland or England, known only to the people who buried the dead on their doorsteps and who recognized no lords or nation but their own.