The Steel Bonnets

As to any geographical pattern of raids, it is difficult to say more than that the general trend from Scotland was south-eastwards, the Western end of the frontier containing by far the most troublesome elements, while from England the Middle March raiders forayed in all directions. Edward Aglionby’s report to Burghley of 1592 is quite definite that the English West and Middle Marches suffered most from Liddesdale, but that Teviotdale “doth never offend the West Border”. Lord Willoughby, at Berwick, was equally positive that all the spoils in the English East March were committed over the Tweed fords.

But it is dangerous to take these generalisations too much for granted, just as it is unwise to emphasise too strongly the importance of the so-called “reivers’ roads” which cross the Border at various points. It is tempting for a geographer to pick on well-defined paths and passages, and suggest that these were used habitually by the rustlers. The last thing a Border reiver wanted was to follow a known route, especially on the way home. There were, by contemporary calculation, more than forty passages into the English Middle March,1 but unless the Border character has changed considerably, they were probably often ignored in favour of going “over the tops”. Men who know their business can take cattle over some unpromising country.

One thing is sure: the ground most often crossed by raiders was the Bewcastle Waste, a wild area of fell and moor lying south-east of Liddesdale on the English side. It was the very hub of the Middle and West Marches, and there is ample documentary confirmation of Lord Dacre’s assertion in 1528, that “theye come thorow Bewcastelldale, and retirnes, for the moste parte, the same waye agayne”.

But not invariably, according to Thomas Musgrave fifty years later. Writing to Burghley, he described two Liddesdale routes quite specifically; one, directed at the Coquet Valley, skirted Bewcastle to the east and ran “by the Perlfell without the Horse Head near Kelder, and so along abone Chepechase”. The second, to Tyne Water, was by Kershopehead, skirting Gele Crage, and by Tarnbek, Bogells Gar, Spye Crag, and Lampert. Musgrave was an expert frontiersman, and his information can be relied on. But these were routes which would be fashionable for a time—as in the Elliot – Fenwick feud; for the most part, the reivers were liable to ride anywhere, at any time, in any numbers.

To understand how good their scouting and woodcraft was, we should see what they were up against, quite apart from the dark, the weather, and the rough country. On the English side the most expert of all Wardens, Lord Wharton, had established a formidable guard system in the 1550s, whereby the entire frontier, from Solway to Berwick, was under watch night and day, from October to mid-March; local gentlemen were made responsible for arming and horsing their people, and setting and inspecting the watches, which were posted on hilltops, fords, valleys, and every conceivable passage over the Marches. Wharton, a hard man who believed in hanging first and asking questions later, reinforced his system with harsh penalties for neglect of duty; it was death not to resist raiders,2 all intercourse with Scots was forbidden, and gentlemen were under the strictest instructions to see his rules enforced. He knew his Borderers, and was determined to stamp out any fifth column activities on the raiders’ behalf.

Nor could the reivers count on watches always being in the same place; small mobile patrols were also used, and “plump” watches of unusual strength were liable to be set up as occasion demanded.

To man the frontier efficiently, about 1000 watchers were necessary; it follows that in spite of the regulations, there was some defaulting. Young Scrope found difficulty in maintaining plump watches of forty horse in the West, and at Morpeth in the winter of 1597 there was a flat refusal to stand watches, so that a plump watch had to be moved in. Possibly owing to shortage of men, day watches seem to have been indifferently kept in young Scrope’s time.

Watches on the Scottish side seem to have been less organised, which may be significant, but here as in England there was a system of beacons on hilltops and the roofs of towers to give the alarm. Owners of towers were obliged to light their beacons on learning of any fray by night; the penalty for failure was a 3s 4d fine. In Liddesdale the approach of a raid in daylight was signalled by spreading a white sheet over a prominent bush on a hillside or crest, this being repeated all along the valley.

England had another line of defence, in the establishment of numbers of “slewdogges”3 for the tracking down of raiders; money was raised for their maintenance, and from the number of them stolen in raids it is obvious that they were highly prized. They could be worth as much as £10.

So, even allowing for those watchers who were in league with the reivers, or were too terrified to give them away, the business of raiding was fraught with hazards. From the moment the March limits were crossed, the marauders were riding in the shadow of the gallows; if some of their exploits were undoubtedly mean and cruel, they can hardly be called cowardly. Even when they were riding into a frightened countryside (which was often the case in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign), and were sufficiently expert to avoid or evade the guards, tracker dogs, and mobile patrols, to lift their plunder and shake off pursuit, there were some dangers which could not be anticipated. No band could ever be sure that they were the only ones out on the fells at night; half a dozen raids might cross each others’ tracks in the dark, and although hi-jacking was not common, it did happen at least once, to an Elliot party who made a quick dawn foray into Bewcastle only to be jumped by a returning band of English night raiders, who lifted the Scots’ booty of eighty head.

1. The names attached to some of the Middle March riders’ passages are highly evocative: Murders Rack, Hell Cauldron, Keilder Edge, Thrust Pick, etc.

2. The penalty was eventually relaxed, and after 1570 watchers in the English West and Middle Marches who failed to raise a hue and cry against thieves were only held liable for goods stolen.

3. Also given as sloughdogs and sleuthdogs. Scott traces the name from the sloughs and mosses through which they followed the scent, but it seems more likely that it came from sleuth, meaning a track or trail. Trail hounds are common in Cumberland today, where they are used for long-distance racing. They travel at surprising speeds after scent, and it seems possible that the sleuthdogs of the sixteenth century were of this breed, rather than bloodhounds.

XIII

Nothing too hot or too heavy

It is this side of the reiver’s work—the danger, the bravery, the almost sporting spirit in which he rode out—that has been emphasised by the romancers. It was there, no doubt of it, and it is easy to treat him as a hero figure because sometimes he was indeed heroic. People like to remember him at his best, as a jolly, daredevil Robin Hood, rough but generous, a product of his times who was no doubt full of mischief, but was decent at bottom, and had some peculiar patriotic aura glowing round him as he went about his work of pillage. It is not difficult, by a judicious selection of cases and evidence, to justify this view.

Isabell Routledge, a widow, owning a small herd and a house of her own in the English West March, saw him rather differently. On April 2 1581 she was visited by thirty Elliots, who ransacked her home, took her four oxen, her six cows, and her only horse, and made off with all her possessions. At that, she was luckier than another woman named Hetherington, who a few years later was raided, again by Elliots, who murdered her husband and another man, and stole her herd of forty head.

And both were more fortunate than Hecky Noble who, within a few nights of Mrs Hetherington’s widowhood, was a victim of that gay desperado, Dickie Armstrong of Dryhope,1 and his 100 jolly followers. Apart from reiving a herd of 200 head, and destroying nine houses, the raiders also burned alive Hecky’s son John, and his daughter-in-law, who was pregnant.

For Dick of Dryhope this was part of the night’s work. Two days earlier he had murdered a miller named Tailor and another man, burned the mill and twelve houses, and reived 100 beasts. Two months later, he and his friends were despoiling another woman, Margaret Forster, of Bewcastle, stealing her eighteen cattle and rifling her home.

These are not isolated cases. On the contrary, they are typical of Border raiding. The lists are endless of small herds lifted, of homes burned, of “insight” (household goods) removed, value a few pounds, of men wounded, or kidnapped, or occasionally killed. To give an idea of what this meant, one can only examine figures for certain areas and periods.

When the Elliots of Liddesdale were riding in the summer of 1581, they were moving in bands generally 100 strong. In June and July alone they stole in the West March of England 274 cattle and twelve horses, ransacked nine houses, “wounded and maimed” three men, and took one prisoner. Statistics are deceptive; if one tries to see it in the light of a modern newspaper report, it is easier to imagine the horror of thirty sturdy hooligans descending on a woman’s house in the night, looting and smashing, and then riding off. This happened along the Marches day in, day out, year after year.

It is instructive to consider the havoc wrought by only one of the Border raiding tribes, over a period. Figures are available for the forays run by the Elliots over a decade from the early 1580s; they are almost certainly conservative figures, since they take account only of actual raids complained of and recorded. And they include only raids in which the Elliots were in a majority; other forays in which the Elliots took a hand, but were not the ringleaders, have been excluded.

There were more than forty of these “exclusively Elliot” raids, and the total score, at the lowest estimate, was more than 3000 cattle stolen, over £1000 worth of insight taken, sixty-six buildings destroyed, fourteen men murdered, and 146 prisoners kidnapped. And this was done, not by the entire Elliot clan, but by only seventy-nine principal riders with their unnamed followers. Taking account of population, property values, the purchasing power of money, the size of the area involved, and the general social conditions, it is worth considering whether the Gennas in Chicago, or the Jameses in the Midwest, or the Gilzais of the North-west Frontier, were such an appalling continual menace as this one Scottish family of the Western Border.

The state of affairs looks even worse when regarded not from a family standpoint, but a geographical one. The Elliots were one of many robber families; Liddesdale was one of many robber’s roosts, though admittedly the worst by far. According to a list of bills against Liddesdale, dated April 30 1590, the reivers of that valley alone were riding an average of a raid a week through the winter of 1589–90. In that time they carried off more than 850 beasts, took sixty prisoners, wounded ten men, killed one, took insight of £200, and burned five houses.

If one adds in the previous year, Liddesdale’s total is swollen by another 600-odd beasts, four murders, twenty-four prisoners, and one town sacked.

It is quite a record, and from it and other lists of complaints—for it must be emphasised that the figures cited are not unusually high or out of the way—a different picture of the Border reiver emerges. He can be seen for what he very often was, not at all heroic, but a nasty, cruel, mean-spirited ruffian, who preferred the soft mark provided by small farmers, widows, and lonely steadings; who came in overwhelming force, destroyed wantonly, beat up and even killed if he was resisted, and literally stripped his victims of everything they had.

It is fair to quote from a detailed list of the goods taken by a band of thirty Crosers and Elliots in November 1589 from a home on the Middle March; apart from cattle and weapons, the robbers’ haul also included a woman’s kirtle and sleeves, kerchiefs, underclothes, sheets, a cauldron, a pan, shirts, and four “children’s coates”. A far cry from Sherwood and the legendary code of robbing the rich to give to the poor. Nor were such petty spoils the exclusive prey of the broken men and outlaws; this was the kind of work that such romantic champions as the Bold Buccleuch and Kinmont Willie were doing; the fact that they did it on a much greater scale lends them no dignity at all.

This is to look at reiving’s blackest side, and it is fatally easy to make the mistake of judging by modern standards, and to forget that, so far as the actual pillaging was concerned, no one thought it a matter for shame. A great deal of nonsense has been talked and written about the Borderer’s moral standards, and one is right to be sceptical of apologists; nevertheless, it is most important to appreciate the distinction, in the Border mind, between reiving, with its associated offences—blackmail, kidnapping, feud killing, and so on—on the one hand, and “ordinary” crime on the other. Robert Carey was one outsider who fully understood this distinction, and although he did not condone the reivers’ behaviour, he did try to explain it. “So have they (the Scots) been used to rob and spoil, and think it their inherytance, scorning all opposition”, he wrote, adding that “the English thief [is] as bad or worse than the Scot”. Most of us do not think of ourselves as criminals, but possibly there are things in our daily lives which we regard as our “inheritance” which will move future generations to critical disgust.

Crime which had nothing to do with reiving, however, was regarded by the Borderers much as other communities have always regarded it. Interesting evidence of this appears in Carey’s memoirs, when he mentions “2 gentlemen theeves that robbed and took purses from travellers in the highways (a theft that was never heard of in these parts before)”. Carey “got them betrayed”, and they were hanged at Newcastle.

This is not to argue, as some writers have done, that the reiver should be judged in a more sympathetic light than an ordinary criminal, but to point out that, if he is to be judged, his own standards of right and wrong should be taken into consideration. To assume that they were the same as those of even his fellow-Elizabethans would be a mistake.

5.The Liddel Water runs down from Liddesdale to Kershopefoot, where it is joined by the little Kershope Burn (right of picture). This was a favourite site for days of truce between the English West March and Liddesdale, and is almost the exact geographical centre of the whole West and Middle Border. The frontier line runs down the Kershope and then downstream along the Liddel; the stony shore in the right foreground is England, while the clump of trees beyond the burn stands in Scotland.

6. Hollows Tower, an Armstrong hold on the Esk, has lost its roof but is otherwise a well-preserved specimen of the Border peel. Johnnie Armstrong, the famous reiver, had a tower near Hollows village, but it has disappeared, and the present Hollows was probably built later in the sixteenth century.

7. Carlisle Castle, headquarters of the English West March Warden, and the strongest fortress in the Border country, is a massive hold of red stone which dominates the northern end of the city. Begun nearly nine hundred years ago by William Rufus, it has probably seen as much fighting as any place in Britain; in time of war it was the key bastion against Scottish invasion, and the stark, rugged lines of its architecture make no concessions to romantic beauty. Still, it was not impregnable, and Kinmont Willie was only one of the Borderers who broke out of it. Other temporary residents have included Edward I, Richard III, and Mary Queen of Scots. This view, taken from inside the old city, shows the main gateway (left) and the keep.

8. A reiver’s eye view of the English Middle March from the southern Cheviots just below the Border line, showing the empty tufted hill country typical of this part of the frontier. Redesdale lies beyond the hills in the distance, and the lower land between is the kind of “passage and hye way for the theefe” crossed by the East Teviotdale forayers.

Another common error about Border reiving is to suppose that one side was worse than the other. Most of the examples cited here are of Scottish raids against England; this is simply because the English records are far fuller, and provide more interesting details; if one reads through the colossal lists of raids contained in Elizabethan papers, without a proper background knowledge, one might conclude that poor inoffensive England was an unresisting prey of the predatory Scots. How untrue this would be is shown in the accounting prepared by young Scrope himself in September 1593, of the respective damages done by Scottish and English reivers in the Western Border.

Liddesdale, for once, had taken worse than it gave; for £3230 worth of damage done to England, it had suffered £8000 worth. The Scottish West March raiders had despoiled England to the tune of £6470, but in return had suffered £33,600 of loss. English maurauding had exceeded that of Scotland by the astounding total of almost £32,000 for that particular period.

But usually there was little to choose between the two, and it is more useful to consider the total damage listed by Scrope, which was over £50,000 worth—and this is for only one-third of the Border. Admittedly, the figure covers several years, but if one is extremely conservative and multiplies it only by ten to give an idea of what it means in modern values, we have a crime bill, for the Western Marches only, of half a million pounds.

Another estimate, made in 1596–7 by William Bowes, gives a figure, for all Scottish raids over a ten-year period, of £92,989 6s 1d, of which three-quarters was charged to Liddesdale and Teviotdale. A total, by our standards, of about a million pounds.

Reiving was a very big small business.

1. Dickie of Dryhope (or Driupp) is mentioned in the Ballad of Kinmont Willie as a principal in the raid on Carlisle Castle, and the slayer of “the fause Sakelde”. He is not mentioned, however, in the detailed list of the Carlisle raiders sent by young Scrope to Burghley (April 14 1596), so there is no reason to suppose he was there at all. The last mention of him is on March 7 1594, when at a Warden meeting at Kershopefoot he was stated to be no longer living in Liddesdale.

XIV

A parcel of rogues

The following are case-histories of three Border reivers, pieced together from the records of the time. They are incomplete, but they may be sufficient to give an idea of a typical raider’s activities, and show the kind of factual basis on which so many legends rest.

William Armstrong of Kinmont

Kinmont Willie, perhaps the best-known of Border reivers, deserved his reputation. He raided on the big scale, striking not at single farms and villages, but at whole areas, at the head of bands 300 strong. He liked to ride by day, usually eastward from his tower at Morton Rigg, which was right on the Border not far north of Carlisle. His favourite target was Tynedale.

The first of his raids recorded was against the Milburns in that valley, in August 1583, when Armstrong was probably in his forties. Eight separate villages were attacked, several houses burned, 800 cattle stolen, £200 worth of goods taken, six men killed, eleven wounded, and thirty prisoners carried off.

The following year he and Nebless Clem Croser were back on another day foray with 300 riders, lifting 1300 cattle, sixty horses, and £2000 worth of goods, burning sixty houses, and killing ten men.

In 1585 Kinmont Willie was occupied with raiding in his own country; he accompanied the Earl of Angus’s campaign against the Earl of Arran, and took the opportunity to pillage in Stirling. It was this raid that made his name, and turned it into a byword for violent crime. But his biggest raid of all occurred eight years later, when he was in Tynedale with 1000 men, carrying off more than 2000 beasts and £300 in spoil.

He seems to have been fairly quiet until 1596, when his famous capture and rescue from Carlisle Castle took place (see Chapter XLI), and after that some of the old fire died. Perhaps he was just getting old, but his raids thereafter were minor affairs. He took the Captain of Bewcastle and sixteen others prisoner in 1597, ransomed them, stole twenty-four horses, and committed some “slaughter”; the bill (charge) against him for this was fouled by confession—which means he pleaded guilty to it. At this time he was being raided himself, from the English West March, his house sacked twice and burned once, 300 of his beasts stolen, and two of his men killed. He fell into English hands again on one of these occasions, but was released.

By this time the former leader of the great day forays had declined to the joint command of an outlaw gang called Sandy’s Bairns; in 1600 he attacked the village of Scotby with 140 riders, burning, taking prisoners and over 100 cattle, and with a last spark of his old bravado, riding on to Carlisle the same evening with some “English disobedients”. They smashed in a few doors at the Rickergate, damaged the bridge chains, took some prisoners, and rode under the Castle wall roaring, “Upon them, upon them, a Dacre, a Dacre, a red bull, a red bull!” which caused some alarm; the citizens stood to arms and the beacon was lit, but presently the raiders retired, no doubt to sober up.

Next year the old ruffian was operating a protection racket at Scaleby, and doing a little in the way of illicit horse-trading and receiving stolen goods. In 1602 he rode his last foray, probably on Low and High Hesket, south of Carlisle. He was still alive two years later, and his four sons who had helped to get him out of Carlisle Castle in 1596, are frequently named in the later Border raids. But the old robber, full of years and dishonour, probably died in his bed.

Walter Scott of Harden

“Auld Wat” of Harden has been represented as the Falstaff of the Borders, a fierce, big-bellied humorous old rascal who is supposed to have passed a haystack on returning from a raid and muttered: “Aye, if ye had fower legs ye wouldnae stand there lang.” A number of Border myths are connected with him, and possibly they have some truth, but the bare facts of his foraying are as follows.

He and a handful of Elliots stole two mares and a foal from the Gelt in July 1595, and sixty head of cattle from Triermain two months later. In the following year, with the same Elliots, he ran a day foray in Gilsland with 400 men, took 300 cattle, twenty horses, burned twenty houses, “taking and burning [sic] gold money apperrell worth £400” and “mutilating” several persons. Another raid yielded him 300 beasts and the spoil of two houses, worth £100.

He raided Bellingham in 1597 with more than 300 horse, killed three men, and carried off 400 head, the March being too weak to pursue him. “With shame and grief I speak it,” wrote Eure, “the Scotts went away unfought withall.”

Auld Wat was a principal in Kinmont Willie’s rescue, and in his preliminary report young Scrope mistakenly credited him with being the actual ring-leader. Yet although he is referred to as Buccleuch’s right-hand man, he does not appear to have been well known south of the frontier. Scrope refers to him as “one Wattie Harden”, and Eure even gave his surname as Elliot. But he was important enough on the Scottish side to have been involved in the Raid of Falkland in 1592, in which the wild Earl of Bothwell tried to capture King James VI;1

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