‘A Factious and Naughty People’
The weather changes quickly on the high moors of Liddesdale. When the clouds are spilling over the Border fells or surging up the valley, a green hillside shining in the sun can suddenly turn black. In that volatile landscape, the rout of a band of reivers camped out on Tarras Moss seems inconsequential from whichever side the tale is told. It was far from being the last skirmish between reivers and government troops. In 1649, the author of a guide to Newcastle upon Tyne and its hinterland recalled the time when there were wardens of the East, West and Middle Marches ‘who had power by martial law to repress all enormities and outrages’. To this day, he wrote, the ‘country that William the Conqueror did not subdue’ observes its own laws and customs: ‘Highlanders’ come down from the dales to steal horses and cattle with such cunning that another thief must be employed to steal the animals back. They ‘subject themselves to no justice’ ‘but bang it out bravely, one and his kindred against the other’. Even so, every year, many of those wild men are ‘brought . . . into the gaol of Newcastle, and at the assizes are condemned and hanged, sometimes twenty or thirty’.
The enduring image of the Tarras Moss battle is not the fictitious English cow or the log cabins by the Liddel but the spectacle of a thousand Scottish and English soldiers under one leader swarming over the moor below Tinnis Hill. An English warden with the backing of a Scottish king rode against a rebel clan which recognized neither one country nor the other. ‘Administrative centralization’ may not be words to stir the blood like ‘the false Salkeld’ or ‘the keen Lord Scroop’, but this was the true nemesis of the reivers.
On 11 July 1603, two years after the siege of Tarras Moss and two months after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Union of the Crowns was proclaimed by King James, henceforth to be titled king of ‘Great Britain’. The two nations had become a kingdom with ‘but one common limit or rather guard of the Ocean sea, making the whole a little world within itself’, with one language and one religion. Only now, with the abolition of its last remaining land border, could that kingdom be properly described, as it had been in Shakespeare’s Richard II – a play recently staged in London by supporters of James VI – as a ‘little world’, a ‘fortress built by nature for herself’, a ‘precious stone, set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall, / Or as a moat defensive to a house’.
The border counties became the Middle Shires – ‘the Navell or Umbilick of both Kingdomes’ – and the office of warden was abolished, if only in name. Border strongholds were to be dismantled (a difficult order, only partly carried out). All feuds would cease and the only horses permitted, apart from those of gentlemen, would be ‘mean nags’ for tilling fields. The borderers were to ‘put away all armour and weapons, as well offensive as defensive, as jacks, spears, lances, swords, daggers, steelcaps, hagbuts, pistols, plate sleeves, and such like’. Sleuth hounds or ‘slough dogs’ – a speciality of the Borders – were to be kept at certain places, including Sarkfoot and Moat, for pursuing offenders through the otherwise impassable bogs and mosses.36
Four years later, when James addressed Parliament, the ‘one nation’ dream was still blossoming in his mind as it withered in reality. The sun of righteousness had risen and warmed the fertile lands between the Cheviots and the Solway:
Where there was nothing before . . . but bloodshed, oppressions, complaints and outcries, they now live every man peaceably under his owne figgetree37 . . . The Marches beyond and on this side Twede, are as fruitfull and as peaceable as most parts of England.
The symbolic heart of the Middle Shires, the Debatable Land, which had long been ‘a little world within itself’, was to be taken from the ‘rebels, thieves, plunderers, outlaws and other evildoers and disturbers of our peace’. The English portion was bestowed on the Earl of Cumberland and the Scottish portion on James Maxwell and Robert Douglas, who were expected to police the territory. The two land grants precisely describe the limits of ‘the debetable landis’, many of whose secret places were mentioned here in writing for the first time. Somehow, in all the tussles of a hundred years, that ragged remnant of ancient law and custom had retained its shape and identity.
March law, which had ensured the region’s peculiar unity and independence, was replaced by the law of the land or rather, since administrators were becoming more self-consciously Scottish or English than ever, by the laws of both lands: the Border Commission set up to pacify the Borders was in practice two quite separate commissions. The old system of trods, trysts, bills and bauchling was civilized and moderate by comparison. In James’s Great Britain, minor theft was punishable by death, and, as the reivers were about to discover, state justice could operate with terrifying speed.
The borderers who disturbed the pious dream of unity had been living for many years in a country in the middle of Britain which was neither Scottish nor English. Those ‘mysguyded menn’ were now to be eradicated. ‘All theeves, murderers, oppressouris and vagabondis’, declared James in 1604, must be ‘quyte rooted out’, and ‘severe and indifferent justice [must] be ministered upon all offenders’. Thomas Armstrong, who had shot the Scottish warden Carmichael, had been hanged in 1601 after having his right hand cut off. His chained body was displayed on Burgh Muir on the southern edge of Edinburgh. In 1606, the case was reopened and several other presumed murderers of Carmichael, including ‘Lang Sandy’, were hanged in Edinburgh. Many more were executed for other offences.
Technically, the purge was not a massacre since all those who were strangled to death received a trial. The trial, however, came after the execution. The practice came to be known as ‘Jeddart justice’, from the court at Jedburgh. This efficient, modern system was considered by James VI an infinitely better means of furthering God’s plan than the laws and customs of ‘the late Marches’, which were now ‘utterlie frustrated and expyred’.
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The other preferred solution to Border anarchy had been considered as early as 1527, when the Scottish Privy Council had suggested rounding up the Armstrongs, Nixons and other thieves and traitors of both countries and shipping them off to ‘Ireland or other far parts, from which they might never return home again’. In 1604, shortly after the latest banishment from Scotland of ‘all idle persons’, including fairground charlatans, ‘buffoons and strolling bards, and any calling themselves Egyptians’, James VI instructed the Border commissioners to expel ‘all in whom there can be expected no hope of amendment . . . to some other place, where the change of aire will make in them an exchange of their manners’.
The Grahams, who had gone on the rampage in the ‘busy week’ following the death of Queen Elizabeth and who were still murdering and extorting ‘blackmail’ from their neighbours, were made to sign a document in which they begged the King to ‘banish us (as a tumultuouse Collony) into some other partes of your kingdomes’, where they would ‘spend the residue of our miserable and sorrowful dayes in lamenting and sorroweing for our offences committed against your highness’.
Though it proved difficult to find reliable escorts, one hundred and fifty Grahams were finally shipped to the ports of Flushing and Brill in the Netherlands, which the English had occupied since the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish. They sailed from Newcastle on 7 July 1605. Some died, but others escaped, and just over a month later, Grahams were reported to be hiding in Eskdale and even walking openly in the streets of Edinburgh.
It was then decided that they should be deported to Ireland. Sir Ralph Sidley, an English landowner in Roscommon, agreed to take them as tenants. Donations were extracted from the gentlemen of Cumberland and Westmorland: this would provide the settlers with livestock and, it was hoped, encourage them to leave peacefully. The Graham chiefs asked for the money to be paid to them directly. For obvious reasons, the request was refused. In the late summer of 1606, fifty families were taken to the port of Workington on the Cumbrian coast. Pregnant women and children were left behind: they would follow the menfolk in the spring, when the colony had been established.
The Trail of Tears of the Graham clan in 1606 has been described as one of the great neglected tragedies of Anglo-Scottish history. The clan was uprooted from the fields and marshes it had occupied for ninety years. As tenant farmers in Roscommon, the Grahams suffered, not only from their own incompetence – the most capable of them having fled or died – but also from the scourge of homesickness. In August 1607, Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Deputy of Ireland, informed the Privy Council that the plan to enrol some of the Grahams in the army might not prove workable: ‘their minds are so much at their homes from whence they came, without hope of return, that they will not like the poor soldier’s life and fare, but will steal away into England, do what they can to the contrary’.
The Irish from whom the land had been taken were supposed to serve the Grahams as a labour force, but none of the Grahams spoke Gaelic and the deportees were naturally treated with suspicion. A pathetic petition signed by William Graham of Meedop, who, ten years before, had assisted Buccleuch in his rescue of Kinmont Willie, stated that they had found their assigned lands to be waste, devoid of wood and water, that they were now starving, and that Sir Ralph Sidley had kept all the donations for himself and was currently nowhere to be found. (He had had to leave for Dublin and London on official business.) ‘Some of them had travelled a day’s journey in search of Sir Ralph Sidley, but without success.’
Evicted from the lands which their great-grandfathers had misappropriated, the reiving Grahams were exonerated in the eyes of later generations by the cruelty of their treatment. In the wretchedness of exile, their wheedling and foot-dragging, their endless broken promises and manglings of the truth were, for once, not entirely unjustified. One of their descendants, John Graham of Grasmere, was so convinced by their pitiful cries that he wrote a book, Condition of the Border at the Union: Destruction of the Graham Clan (1907), in which he claimed that the name of his ‘race’ had been blackened by the Earl of Cumberland because he wanted to get his hands on the Graham estate.
The Earl, in fact, had found the English Debatable Land a poisoned chalice. As a professional buccaneer, he preferred to snatch his wealth from Portuguese and Spanish ships, and the Grahams were a worse prospect than any band of pirates: ‘My thoughts must turn from intercepting of carracks [merchant galleons] to sowing of corn, from rigging ship to breeding sheep, and from honour to clownish cogitations.’
Even from their cradles bred and brought up in theft, spoil and blood . . . Neither have they any other trade, nor any other means (many of them) to live but by stealing, which they account not shame, but rather a grace and credit unto them . . . I fear they are not on the sudden so easily to be reformed.
In Roscommon, Sir Ralph Sidley carefully administered, rather than ‘pocketed’, the funds that were destined to establish the Grahams. The owner of a vast territory spoiled by war and neglect, he had no reason to leave his tenants to starve, but he found them as idle as horse thieves. They let the summer and autumn pass without preparing for the spring and appeared to spend ‘both the time and anything they had or might get, in drinking, and upon horses and dogs for hunting and pleasure’. Others who had to deal with them thought them ‘a factious and naughty people’.38 The Grahams who were sent to join the army were ‘so turbulent and busy39 that one of them is able to dispose a whole garrison to become so’.
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In this dark night of the Graham clan, a retrospective light shines on the little country they had left behind. If the deported Grahams were so hapless in Ireland, neither building houses nor purchasing the necessary corn and livestock, how is it that their half of the Debatable Land had become such a model of productive pasture and reclaimed wasteland? In 1608, while the fields of Roscommon lay fallow, only a tiny proportion of the English Debatable Land was still ‘mossy ground’ or ‘marshland’. Half the remainder was pasture, the other half was ‘known ground’,40 consisting of meadow and arable.
The crofts, paddocks, cornfields, grassland and managed woods of the former Debatable Land proved the surprising economic benefits of the reiving system. A list drawn up in 1602 recorded the names of four hundred and forty-two male adults living on lands controlled by the Graham clan. Almost one-third of these were Grahams, of whom twenty-four were ‘goodmen’ (headmen), responsible for a number of tenants, servants and other dependants. Most of these two hundred and ninety-six inferior people had a different surname: Batie, Bell, Byers, Calvert, Dixon, Dunne, Halliday, Little, Pattison, Storey and seventy-seven other names, all still present in the area today. These are the people – mostly Scottish immigrants – who had drained and improved the fields of the Debatable Land under the lairdship of the Grahams and whose names only rarely appear in the records of reiving raids. They formed a large underclass in this bottom-heavy hierarchy. Though they were exploited by the Grahams, they were protected from the more catastrophic plundering of other tyrants. As Thomas Musgrave explained in 1583, ‘the poore are oppressed’ but ‘are glade to sell their levinges [livelihoods] to them that oppres them’.
The expulsion of the Grahams was not a lowland equivalent of the Highland Clearances. It was a specific attack on the ‘lairds’, whose authority would be replaced by that of the state. The list of families to be transported to Ireland is almost exclusively a list of Grahams. Only eighteen of the one hundred and twelve had a different sur-name.
The feudal regime of the Grahams explains the obscure rebellion which took place on the quayside at Workington on the Cumbrian coast. Several of the deportees, including some subservient members of the Graham clan, were visibly more wretched than the others. They were observed to belong to ‘the poorer and least dangerous sort’. Just as the ship was about to sail, their masters being for once restrained and powerless until they reached Ireland, they seized their chance and ‘at the instant [of transportation], fled and hid themselves . . . rather out of weariness of the bondage they lived under their masters the chief Greames . . . than any other cause’.
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Though the purging of the English and Scottish Middle Shires was directed by the ‘King of Great Britain’, pacification measures on the Scottish side took a very different form. Claiming to be ‘loth to take away the lives of his subjects when any other means will serve’, James nonetheless granted immunity to anyone who would cull the reivers. In 1607, a year after the execution of several Armstrongs, they and the neighbouring Irwins (including ‘Curst Georgie’) were still ensconced in every corner of the Scottish Debatable Land, at Harelaw, Hollows, Kinmont and Rowanburn. Bent on self-destruction or unable to mend their ways, they had ‘impeded and stayed’ the men who were sent to conduct a fresh survey of the ‘debetable landis’. By ‘thair insolent caryage and behaviour’, and by ‘oppressioun and bangstrie’41, they were preventing the new owners of the land, Maxwell and Douglas, from enjoying their property, thus making the King’s gift ‘ineffectuall’.
The men who were given the job of ‘purifying’ and policing the Scottish Marches believed that deportation and trials were a waste of time. Mass hangings took place at Jedburgh and Dumfries. Meanwhile, outlaws continued to break out of prisons and to sneak back from abroad.42 By good fortune, the ‘bold Buccleuch’, who had been fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands, returned to Scotland in 1608. James and the Privy Council thought him just the man for the job.
A possible objection was that Buccleuch would be butchering men who had fought for him in the past. This turned out not to be a problem. Buccleuch’s blitzkrieg on the borderers is known from the ‘letter of approval and indemnity’ issued to him by King James once the massacre was over. Buccleuch was not to be punished for his excellent service ‘in hanging with a halter and drowning all the said malefactors taken and apprehended, in slaying and killing the fugitives . . . and in combustion, fire-raising, casting down, demolishing and destroying of their houses and their buildings’.
In consequence of the lack of prisons, and to prevent the importunate intercession of certain good persons, the most part of these desperate men, at once and immediately on their apprehension, were necessarily hanged, and punished with death by pit and gallows off-hand on the very spot at which they were apprehended, dispensing with the ordinary forms of justice, as they were publicly known.
In other words, by ignoring the law of the land and every plea for mercy, Buccleuch had, with sword and rope, solved the problem of overcrowded prisons, thereby ‘furthering and stablishing the peace and quietness of the kingdom’. As one of the Buccleuch family’s nineteenth-century hagiographers puts it, ‘that letter . . . is a very important testimony in favour of Buccleuch’, and the slaughter of those ‘desperate and wicked men’ provided a fitting end to ‘the stirring career of the Lord Buccleuch’.
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In this way, the ‘batable land’, which had been a model of peaceful cooperation until the invasion of Armstrongs and Grahams in the 1510s, became the scene of one of the worst purges in British history. Sir William Cranston, deputy lieutenant of the Scottish Marches, pursued the work of ‘purification’ with torture and execution and was praised by King James for hacking off ‘the rottin and cankered memberis and flesche being in those pairtis of oure kingdome’. A sombre image of its former self at the heart of James’s new nation, the Debatable Land seemed to mark the end of its history by becoming the centre of events.
Despite its official abolition in 1551, it had remained impressed on the landscape for another half century. Ten years before the Union of the Crowns, Robert Carey had ridden to the Graham tower at Netherby to arrest the murderer of a churchman. A boy had been seen galloping away on his horse to raise the alarm, and Carey’s fellow officer had said, ‘Do you see that boy that rideth away so fast? He will be in Scotland within this half hour’ – which can only mean that several miles of Debatable Land were still considered to separate England from Scotland. Even after the Union, official raids had been concentrated in the Debatable Land, and its special, separate status had been reconfirmed by the survey and the land grants of 1604.
By 1629, most of the people who had known the Debatable Land in its wildest days were dead – James VI, the Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Scrope and (presumably) Kinmont Willie. Horse-thieving continued, but it was a local nuisance rather than a threat to national stability. That year, three English gentlemen were travelling through Cumberland on their way to Scotland. Leaving Carlisle, they passed through ‘wet moorish mossy ground’, but after crossing the river Lyne, they came into a fertile plain where the fields were filled with corn stacks. Here, they were told, was ‘the debateable land’: ‘The debateable land is three miles long and 3 broad, Soleme moss is on debatable land beyond Esk in Arthuret parish’.
Not a single one of the early medieval chapels remained, but at Arthuret itself, a new church had been built by national subscription as part of a campaign to bring the civilizing influence of religion to the borderers, with ministers ‘to inform the lawless people of their duty, and to watch over their manners’. The builders had absconded with the money without completing the tower, and the poor people of the parish could still not say the Lord’s Prayer, but it was only a matter of time before the true, Protestant religion prevailed over what the new owner of Netherby called their ‘lewd vices’.
The English travellers in 1629 were looking at a scene rich in history: ‘By this church [Arthuret] is the Howe end where the thieves in old time met and harboured.’ At Netherby, they saw ‘the houses of the Graemes that were’. There was ‘one little stone tower garretted and slated or thatched’, and ‘some of the form of a little tower not garretted’. But this, they later discovered, was normal accommodation for a Scottish laird. Surprisingly, the former stronghold of the Grahams was occupied by a clan chief, known as ‘the Good Man of Netherby in the Wood’.43
Sir Richard Graham, member of parliament for Carlisle, had just bought back the English Debatable Land from a relieved Earl of Cumberland. Richard was the second son of the reiver Fergus Graham of Plomp (now Plumpe, on the river Sark near Gretna). ‘Fargus the Plumpes’ or ‘Fargie of the Plump’, as he was also known, had been one of the conspirators in the release of Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle. His first son had been deported to the Netherlands, but young Richard had lain low for a time and then set off for London on foot, where he found employment as the groom of King James’s lover, the Duke of Buckingham, ‘having some spark of wit, and skill in moss-trooping and horse racing’.
While Richard was ingratiating himself with powerful gentlemen, another young reiver had been learning to exploit his reiving expertise. After a youth of sheep-stealing, Archibald Armstrong, who was born in or on the edge of the Debatable Land, became King James’s favourite jester, specializing in mock jousts. He retained his position in the court of Charles I. On a royal visit to Spain, Archie taunted the Infanta with the defeat of the Armada. Despite antagonizing the Archbishop of Canterbury, he ‘jested himself into a fair estate’ and became a landowner and a ruthless money-lender. Apart from Sir Richard Graham’s official correspondence, the only notable text known to have been written by a former reiver is Archie Armstrong’s pamphlet, Archy’s Dream, in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is consigned to Hell.
Perhaps it was the ultimate fate of the reivers to provide entertainment, just as they now play a leading role in Cumbrian and Borders tourism. The antics of Richard Graham and Archie Armstrong are reminders of the sheer callous fun of reiving in its glory days, when humble farmers played practical jokes on the high and mighty, burned down their houses and mills, galloped over the mosses under a harvest moon and stole anything that moved. ‘By my soul’, an old reiver returning from a raid is said to have exclaimed when passing an unusually large haystack, ‘Had ye but four feet, ye should not stand lang there!’
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After 1629, there are no more substantial records of the Debatable Land as a recognizable entity. The last sign that its boundaries lived on in local memory dates from nearly two centuries after its partition. One day in 1740, the rector of Kirkandrews set out to trace the limits of his parish. He reached the river Sark, where the boundary of the former Debatable Land coincides with the border between England and Scotland. In talking to his parishioners, he discovered that parts of the national border had been misplaced. Tradition was so tenacious that the local people could have drawn a map more accurate than that of any cartographer: ‘From the foot of Sark, up Sark to the Scotch Dike, [the border] frequently crosses Sark and follows old water courses, which are known by the inhabitants of both sides.’
This is one of the inconspicuous gems which occasionally wash up on the storm-battered beach of Border history. To the people of the border, the frontier followed the river – but the river as it had run in the distant past, when the Debatable Land was still a separate country. In their eyes, the landscape lived in four dimensions, the shadows of its earlier selves coexisting with the actual scene like the familiar ghosts of ancestors seated at the fireside.
This meant that some parts of England and Scotland were stranded in the opposite country. In a future dis-United Kingdom, when the Sark decides again, as it sometimes does, to move its bed, it might provide English and Scottish property lawyers with some lucrative complications. Even now, there may be some English fields along the Sark which, historically, belong to Scotland, and vice versa.44
Though something of its a-national spirit survives, almost no one living here today knows where the Debatable Land began and ended or even what it was. Some local visitors to the house, when I identified the land across the Liddel as a country that was once neither Scotland nor England, have found it quite plausible that their ancestors didn’t give a hoot about nationality; others said, simply, ‘Sounds like a good idea!’ As for historians, few consider the disappearance of the Debatable Land significant. Most are unaware of its exceptional nature and lump it together with the rest of the border badlands. On a background of national politics, it seems an exotic but irrelevant vestige of local tradition, the domain of ethnology rather than history, doomed to disappear along with the pele towers and the reivers. Having no equivalent in British history, the Debatable Land is easily ignored – a country independent of the two kingdoms, sustained but not created by official treaties, and dating from a time when neither England nor Scotland nor the idea of them existed.