Highways and Byways in the Border

CHAPTER V JED (continued), FERNIHIRST, RAID OK THE REDESWIRE, OTTERBURNE

Across Jed, on a high and leafy bank nearly opposite to Lintalee, stands the picturesque old stronghold of Fernihirst. The original castle was erected by Sir Thomas Ker probably about the year 1476, and the present building dates only from 1598. Its predecessor "stode marvelous strongly within a grete woode," as Daere and Surrey found to their cost in 1523; yet they took it, after "long skirmyshing and moche difficultie," as Surrey reported. Brief and stormy was the existence of this original Fernihirst, stirring, and in some instances horrible, the deeds done within and around its walls. In 1548 the English held it, Shrewsbury, when he returned to the south in that year, having left there a garrison of something like eighty or ninety men. At this period Scotland, still dazed and stricken under the stunning blow of Pinkie in 1547, was in a deplorable, and apparently a very helpless, condition. Most of her strongholds were in English hands; her chief men for the greater part had come in and made submission to Somerset; the poorer sort in most parts of the Border were at the mercy of the hated invader. Here, at Fernihirst, the English garrison was under the command of one whose oppression and cruel lust were devilish, and whose treatment of unprotected country-folk was such as would justify almost any conceivable form of revenge on the part of the men of Jedforest. M. de Beaugué, a French officer who was then in Scotland, and who in his "Histoire de la Guerre d'Ecosse" chronicles the campaigns of 1548, 1549, says that during all the time this savage licentious devil remained near Jedburgh "he never came across a young girl but he outraged her, never an old woman but he put her to death with cruel torture."

And, as the proverb has it: "Like master, like man"; where their captain forgot his manhood, and disgraced the name of Englishman, how were the men under his command likely to conduct themselves? The people of the Forest of Jedworth thus had ghastly wrongs to wipe out; and when their chance came, they seized on it with avidity.

The cruelties inflicted on each other by both nations at this period were detestable and revolting. "Put men, women, and children to fire and sword without exception, when any resistance shall be made against you," wrote Henry VIII. to Lord Hertford in 1544, instructions which were most faithfully carried out. Here at Femihirst our countrymen went, if possible, "one better," and their treatment of prisoners was of the most inhuman and savage nature. Yet if their wrongs were such as are depicted by de Beaugué, can one wonder that, like wild beasts, they tore and mangled?

Early in 1549 there came to Jedburgh a large body of French troops under the Sieur d'Essé, sent to recapture that town, which at the moment was held for the English by a force chiefly composed of Spanish mercenaries. The Spaniards made no great stand, and for the moment the Sieur and his little army were left with time on their hands. To the Sieur went Sir John Ker, then laird of Fernihirst, suggesting that the French general should aid him in recapturing the castle. French and Scots – a small body of the latter, the personal following of Sir John Ker – accordingly made a combined attack and quickly carried the outwork, the garrison retreating to the keep. Here, whilst a party laboured hard to effect a breach in the wall, French arquebusiers were so planted that no man of the garrison could show his face with impunity, or dared to attempt to interfere with the working party, who already in little over one hour had made a practicable breach, large enough at least to admit a man's body. About this time the main French force had come up, and the English garrison could not but see that their position was now desperate. Accordingly they showed a flag of truce, and the English commander, on receiving assurance that he would be allowed to return, came out through the hole in the wall and offered to give up the castle, provided that the lives of the garrison were spared. The Sieur d'Essé, however, would listen to no conditions; the surrender, he said, must be unconditional, and the Englishman therefore returned to his men.

Meantime, news of the attack on Fernihirst had flown abroad over the countryside, and men of Jedforest came hurrying to the scene, breathless with the lust of slaughter, panting with unquenchable thirst for a bloody vengeance. Letting their horses go, and, regardless of everything, rushing in, they burst open and swarmed through the doors of the lower court. And now the bowels of the English leader turned indeed to water, for well he knew what fate would be his were he once to fall into the hands of those frenzied men. Therefore once more hurriedly pressing through the breach, he surrendered himself to two French officers, MM. Dussac and de la Mothe-Rouge. Scarcely, however, had he done so, and even as they led him away, a prisoner, there rushed up a Scot, a dweller in the neighbouring forest of Jed, one who had only too terrible a reason to remember the face of this fiend who had outraged his wife and his young daughter. He said no word, but with a roar as of a wounded beast that charges, he smote with all his strength. And the head of a man went trundling and bumping loosely over the trampled grass, as the knees doubled under a headless trunk that sank almost leisurely to the ground. Then those Scots who most had foul reason to execrate the memory of this treacherous brute, joyfully plunged their hands into his blood as it gushed, and with shouts of exultation seizing his head, they placed it on a long pole and stuck it up by a stone cross that stood by the parting of three ways, that all might see and rejoice over their vengeance.

That was but the beginning of a scene long drawn and terrible in its ferocity. Prisoners were ruthlessly butchered, and when the Scots had murdered all whom they themselves had taken, their lust for blood was so far from slaked that they brought others from the Frenchmen – bartering even some of their arms in exchange – and slew these also with extreme barbarity. "I myself," writes M. de Beaugué, "sold them a prisoner for a small horse. They tied his hands and feet and head together, and placed him thus trussed in the middle of an open space, and ran upon him with their lances, armed as they were and on horseback… until he was dead and his body hacked in a thousand pieces, which they divided among them and carried away on the iron points of their spears."

"I cannot," naively adds the chronicler, "greatly praise the Scots for this practice, but the truth is the English tyrannised over the Borders in a most barbarous manner, and I think it was but fair to repay them, as the saying goes, in their own coin."

So Sir John Ker got back his strong castle. But it did not long remain undisturbed in the family possession. In 1570 there came into Scotland that English expedition under the Earl of Sussex and Lord Hunsdon which played such havoc in the Border, and once more the Merse and Teviotdale were burned and laid waste. "Apon Monday last," writes Lord Hunsdon from Berwick to Sir W. Cecil, under date 23rd April, 1570, "beyng the 17th of thys ynstant, we went owt of thys towne by 6 a cloke at nyght and rode to Warke, where we remayned tyll three or four yn the mornyng; and then sett forward the hole army that was with us att that present, ynto Tyvydale bernyng on bothe hands at the lest two myle; levyng neythercastell, towne, nortowerunburnt tyllwecametojedworth. Many of the townes beyng Bukklews, and a proper tower of hys, called the Mose Howse, wythe three or four caves, wheryn the cuntrey folk had put such stufe as they had: and was very valyantly kept by serten of the cuntrey for two or three owars, but at last taken… The next day we marchyd to Hawyke; wher by the way we began with Farnhurst and Hunthylle, whose howsys we burnt, and all the howsys about them. We could nott blow up Farnhurst, but have so torne ytt with laborars, as ytt wer as goode ley flatt." The building must have been of remark able solidity, for in spite of its being burnt, and left roofless and dismantled, "torne with laborars," in 1570, there can belittle doubt that in less than two years it was again at least tenable, for in 1572 Lord Ruthven, after dispersing at Hawick the forces of Buccleuch and Fernihirst, (who supported the cause of the abdicated Queen,) on his return march to Jedburgh "tuik the housses of Pherniherst, and put men in them," and the place was held for some time after this by the King's troops. Possibly it was more thoroughly knocked about in 1593 than it had been at any other period of its existence. Sir Andrew Ker, then head of the house, when summoned to appear before James and his Privy Council at Jedburgh to answer for his part in aiding the schemes of the Earl of Both well, and for other acts, had failed to put in an appearance, and had consequently been outlawed and declared a rebel. It was also proposed to render him homeless, for on 16th October of that year Carey reports to Burghley that "the King has proclaimed to remain at Jedworth fifteen days, and summoned the barons, gentlemen and freeholders to attend him, minding this day or tomorrow to pull down the lairds of Fernhirst and Hunthill's houses, and all others who have succoured Bothwell." Probably the threat was carried into execution, to a greater or less extent. In any case, 1598 saw a renovated Fernihirst, much as it stands at the present day, when, according to "Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland," it presents "a charming example of a Scottish mansion of the period." Built into the wall above the main doorway of the mansion, (as may be seen in Mr. Hugh Thomson's sketch,) are two panels, that to the left showing the armorial bearings of the Kers, and above, on a scroll, the words:

S. SOLIDEO

"forward in y" name of god"; at the foot, a.k. 1.5.9.8 On the panel to the right is the word "forward"; in the centre of the panel the arms of Sir Andrew's wife, Dame Ann

D. SOLIDEO

Stewart, and beneath, a.s. 1.5.9.8.

As late as 1767 the house seems to have been occasionally used by the Lord Lothian of that day, but it was even then showing signs of dilapidation. It was, however, occupied by farming tenants down to a recent date, as late, I believe, as 1889. About that year extensive repairs were carried out; the ivy which – however picturesque it may have been – was slowly throttling the old walls, was removed, the panels were refaced, the roof made wind and weather proof, and the interior to a great extent restored.

At Smailcleuchfoot, a little higher up the river, and nearly opposite to Fernilhirst Mill, almost, as one might say, within a stone's cast of the castle, stood once the house of a man greatly famed in Jedforest, – Auld Ringan Oliver. No vestige of the house now remains, but the memory of Ringan and the story of the siege he stood within his cottage here still live in Border lore, and were sung of in James Telfer's "Border Ballads" close on a century ago.

"The crystal Jed by SmailcleuchfootFlows on with murmuring din;It seems to sing a dowie dirgeFor him that dwelt therein."

Ringan's forebears, men of mark all of them in their day, dwelt here at Smailcleuchfoot for many a generation. They were there, no doubt, when the Sieur d'Essé recaptured Ferni-hirst for Sir John Ker; there when Dacre stormed it in 1523; there perhaps, helping Douglas, when Father Ellis and his Englishmen were caught feasting on the good fare at Lintalee in 1317. With ancestors such as these, whose whole lives were passed in the midst of endless strife, men ever ready, and glorying in their readiness, to turn out against invading Southern bands, or to slip over Carterfell into Redesdale to plunder those same Southrons, how could Ringan fail to be, what he was, a born fighter! With his enormous frame, immense personal strength, and dauntless courage, there was none in the Border so famed as he. Endless were the tales told of him, – how he could take "a ten half-fou boll of barley in the wield of his arm and fling it across a horse's back with the utmost ease"; how in his youth he raided Newcastle Jail, and rescued two of his friends, who had been, as he thought, unjustly imprisoned therein. The stories of him are endless. Ringan lived in the stirring times of the Covenant, and with a disposition such as his, dourly religious, it is almost needless to say that he was prominent among the more militant section of the Covenanters of the seventeenth century. He was probably present at Drumclog, and he was certainly present at Both well Brig, in 1679, fighting as few fought that bloody day. His home was in caves and among rocks, beneath dripping peat-hags, and in holes in the ground, for many a day after this, but in 1680 he joined the outlawed Hall of Haughhead, and was in the tussle when that Champion of the Covenant was taken at Queensferry what time "those two bloody hounds the Curates of Borrowstonness and Carriden smelled out Mr. Cargill and his companion." Hall was killed, or at least died of his wounds before he could be brought to Edinburgh; but Ringan Oliver and "worthy Mr. Cargill" escaped the net of the fowler. Then, in 1689, he was with Mackay at Killicrankie; and the following day though exhausted with the precipitate flight from the battlefield, he fought at Dunkeld his famous duel with the Highland champion, Rory Dhu Mhor, whom he slew after a most desperate and bloody fight. Bleeding from half a score of wounds, Ringan had been beaten to his knees, and the affair seemed a certain victory for the Highlander. But the latter was over-confident; he thought he had a beaten man at his mercy, and one instant's carelessness gave Ringan his chance. Before his adversary could recover, the point of the Borderer's sword was out between the Highlander's shoulders, and with a roar of astonishment and wrath he fell dead.

But perhaps it was for the siege he stood at Smailcleuchfoot when he was now an old man, that Ringan is best remembered. After a stormy youth and middle age, he had at length settled down in his ancestral home, where he was leading the quiet life of a farmer. As the story is told, it seems that Ringan's strict integrity and high sense of honour had gained for him the respect and friendship of his powerful neighbour at Fernibirst – probably either the first or the second Marquess of Lothian. Perhaps, too, there may have been something in the mutual belief and manner of thought of the two men that drew them together. (There was a Ker of about that date, or a little earlier, who was a zealous Covenanter.) In any case, the friendship was of such a nature that when Lord Lothian found himself, towards the close of his life, compelled to undertake what was then the long and trying journey to London, he left Ringan in charge of his private papers, and entrusted him with the key of a locked room in which valuable documents were kept, and into which he desired that no one should be permitted to enter whilst he himself was absent in the south. As it chanced, after Lord Lothian had started on his journey, his heir, considering, as a matter of course perhaps, that the old lord's prohibition did not apply to him, sent to Ringan demanding the key of the room, into which he had, or said he had, occasion to go. Ringan naturally, but perhaps not very deferentially or even politely, refused to give it up. Thereupon arose hot words, and bitter enmity on the part at least of the younger man, who, with that rather irrational form of vanity not uncommon in youth, imagined himself to be slighted.

And hence came serious consequences to the old Covenanter. For the Marquess died, and the man whom Ringan had offended succeeded to the title and estates. He had always – so the story goes – nursed his wrath to keep it warm, and he might be depended on to pay off, with interest, all old scores against him whom he talked of as that "dour old Cameronian devil." So it happened one day, towards the time of harvest, when corn lay waiting for the sickle in the smiling haughs of Jed, the young lord and his friends, attended by servants in charge of several dogs, came on horseback across the river and began to ride up and down through Ringan's crop, ostensibly looking for hares. The old man remonstrated in vain; no heed was paid to him, and at length, goaded to fury as he saw the havoc being played among his good oates and bere, he snatched up an old musket (that perhaps had seen service at Bothwell Brig) and shot one of the dogs dead. That was enough; the old man had put himself now in the wrong. For the Marquess could plead that, after all, he had only been riding on his own land; and he and his friends could assert that the harm they had done, if any, had been infinitesimal. So the young lord rode off to Jedburgh, and had a summons issued by the Sheriff against Ringan.

It was one thing, however, to issue the summons, quite another to serve it, or afterwards to get Ringan to obey the call. If he persisted in ignoring the summons, there were not many to be found bold enough to go to Smailcleuehfoot for the purpose of haling him before the Court; old as he now was, Ringan's reputation for strength and courage, and for reckless daring, was still great enough to keep the wolves of the law at bay. "But," said the Sheriff, "the law cannot thus be flouted; if he does not come willingly, then he must be made to come." Which of course was quite the right thing to say, especially if he had at hand the force necessary to carry out his threat. But that was where the difficulty came in. Finally, the Sheriff had to go himself to arrest old Ringan, impressing on his way everybody whom he could find capable of helping, including the Marquess himself.

Ringan was warned of their coming, and advised to fly. "No!" said the old man. "I've dune no wrong. Let them touch me wha daur!" But he set about barricading his house, and when the Sheriff and his parry came on the scene they found a building with doors fast and windows shuttered, and no one visible. At their knock, Ringan appeared at a small upper window, but entirely declined to be taken, or to open the door. Then commenced a vigorous assault by the Sheriff and his party. They attempted to break in the door and to rush the building. Ringan opened fire on them with his old musket, and drove them back.

And then for a time there occurred nothing more than a fruitless exchange of shots, as one or other of the Sheriff's men left cover or Ringan showed himself at one of the windows. It appears, however, that there was in the house with the old man a young girl, either his adopted daughter or a domestic who looked after household affairs. This girl had been told to keep out of harm's way, to shelter in a "press" or cupboard well out of any possible range of bullet; but in the heat of battle the old man did not notice that curiosity had drawn her from the safety of this hiding place, and had brought her right behind him at the moment that he fired a shot through the window. It was a good shot, for it clipped away a curl from the Sheriff's wig, and perhaps in his satisfaction at going so near to his mark the old man may have showed himself a little too openly. Anyhow, at that moment two or three muskets replied, the heavy bullets coming with sullen "phut" into the woodwork of the little window-frame. But one flew straighter than the others; Ringan heard behind him a sound, half gasp, half sob, and turned just in time to see the lass sink on the floor, blood pouring from her throat. The old man tried to stanch the wound, but it needed hardly more than a glance to tell that it was far beyond his simple skill, and that she was past hope.

Then the lust of battle seized him, blind fury filled his breast, and he thought only of revenge. He forgot his age, forgot that his fighting days should have been long over, forgot everything but the mad desire to clutch the throats of his foes and to choke the life out of them. So, tearing down the barricades of his door, he rushed out on his enemies like a wild bull charging. But alas for Ringan! part of the discarded barricade caught his foot as he burst over the threshold, and down he came with a crash. Before he could struggle even to his knees, the enemy was on him, and he was down again on his face, half a dozen men swarming over him. Even yet, however, old and hopelessly outnumbered as he was, the fight for a time was not so very unequal, and he might in the end have cast off the crowd that strove to hold and bind him. An ill day it would have been for some of them had he succeeded. But a treacherous pedlar, who had joined the fray for the sake of hire, watching his chance, came behind, and with a blow from a hammer smashed Ringan's jaw and brought him to the ground, stunned. The old man was taken then, bound hand and foot, and carted off to Edinburgh. There, in the foul air of the Tolbooth he lay for eight weary years, suffering tortures great part of the time, not only from the broken jaw, but from old wounds which had broken out afresh, and which from the insanitary condition of the prison now refused to heal. It was a broken, frail old man who came out from that long imprisonment. And he never got back to his beloved Jed. Ringan Oliver died in Edinburgh in 1736; his huge frame sleeps in Greyfriars Churchyard.

As one travels up Jed by the old coach road – whose windings do not invariably desert even the abruptest elbow of the stream – road and river finally part company at the bridge below Camptown. Here the latter's course swings gradually to the right, through leafy banks and under spreading trees, whilst the former, following a straighter route, enters on a long, steady bit of collar-work up the side of a pine-clad brae where, on one hand, lies the old camp from which the adjacent little settlement derives its name, and, on the other, Edgerston, sleeping in its woods. Here once stood Edgerston Castle, which Hertford's men took "by pollicie" in 1544; – someone sold the Rutherfurd of that day. Castle and lands then belonged to the Rutherfurds, one of the most ancient families in Scotland, and still the lands are theirs.

A little way past Edgerston the road begins its long two mile climb to an elevation of close on 1500 feet near the summit of Catcleuch Shin. There, immediately after passing the Carter Bar, it crosses the Border line, and drops steadily down into Redesdale, past the new Catcleuch Reservoir that supplies Newcastle with water, a work which has wiped out of existence one of the pleasantest bits of fishing in the kingdom, where trout were many and game, and of enviable size. Perhaps the trout are there still – for those who may take them – but the capture of a dozen fish in still water cannot match the joy experienced in fighting one good Rede trout in the strong rushing stream where he has passed all his days.

Beyond the Catcleuch Reservoir, a road of easy gradients sweeps down the delightful Rede valley, past innumerable old camps, British and Roman; past Rowchester, into whose little school house, that stands solitary in the angle of two ways, are built numerous stones (carved and otherwise) handily quarried from the adjacent old Roman station of Bremenium; and high up, on the roof of the building, from the same source are various large round stone balls that may have formed part of the ammunition for a Roman ballista. It was this route that the Roman legions followed over the Cheviots in their northward march from the mighty wall they had stretched across England from sea to sea. A few miles east from Catcleuch Shin, their military road bursts suddenly into view of that glorious sweep of country where the triple-peaked Eildons dominate the scene, a landmark that no doubt led them first to the site of their famous Newstead camp. In early nineteenth century days, when His Majesty's mail coaches between Newcastle and Edinburgh came jangling over the crest of this bleak, unprotected bit of road at Catcleueh Shin, taking at a gallant trot the long, stiff gradient that faced them whether they were heading to the south or to the north, the trials of outside passengers in winter time must not seldom have been of a nature truly unenviable. Bitter sleet, driving before a westerly gale, lashed their faces and stole chill wet fingers inside their wraps and upturned collars; drifting, blinding snow, swirling on the wings of a wild north-easter, blurred the guiding line of snow-posts, and even at times hid his leaders from the coachman's sight, so that his first warning of being off the road and on the moor, was a heavy lurch as the coach buried its side in some blind hollow; frost, and a thermometer in the neighbourhood of zero, nipped from ears and nose and toes every vestige of feeling, and chilled to the very bone those whom duty or business forced to travel. It was truly a large assortment of evils that our ancestors had to choose from, in the winter, on that road over into England by the Carter Bar.