The Steel Bonnets. George Fraser MacDonald
The Borderers, he writes, “assume to themselves the greatest habits of licence.… For as, in time of war, they are readily reduced to extreme poverty by the almost daily inroads of the enemy, so, on the restoration of peace, they entirely neglect to cultivate their lands, though fertile, from the fear of the fruits of their labour being immediately destroyed by a new war. Whence it happens that they seek their subsistence by robberies, or rather by plundering and rapine, for they are particularly averse to the shedding of blood; nor do they much concern themselves whether it be from Scots or English that they rob and plunder.”
Leslie has a good deal to say of the characters of the Borderers, and it is not all bad. He is the main authority for the myth that they were reluctant to kill, except in feud; he also maintained “that having once pledged their faith, even to an enemy, they are very strict in observing it, insomuch that they think nothing can be more heinous than violated fidelity.”
In theory, possibly, but this is one of those hallowed Border legends which requires close examination. There was certainly in the sixteenth century a Border code of honour, a kind of hangover from the days of Percy and Douglas, recognised and referred to and in some ways respected. Robert Carey3 wrote to Cecil4 of Scottish gentlemen who “will rather lose their lives and livings, than go back from their word, and break the custom of the Border”. The last phrase is significant. One of Ralph Sadler’s5 English spies said the Scots had no scruples about stealing, “and yet they would not bewray any man that trust in them for all the gold in Scotland and France.” According to Leslie, to be publicly reproached a proven faith-breaker was a greater punishment “even than an honourable death inflicted on the guilty person”.
These are flat, general statements, and they obviously have some basis. But they do not accord with the written records of Border life, with their long catalogues of broken assurances, unredeemed pledges, and the like. If one studies the lives of, say, John Forster6 and John Maxwell,7 it may not be possible to prove either of them liars, but there can be no doubt that lies were being told by someone, profusely and persistently. Sir William Bowes8 despaired of the Scots, “that both can and will say more for a falsehoode, than for my own part I can doe for the truth”, and John Carey thought them “the most crafty and deceitful” on earth. Many of his fellow-officials agreed. The necessity of repeated Border legislation to deal with perjury does not speak for a truthful populace.
It is sometimes argued that Border law could not have been based on good faith and truth-telling if these had not been the norm. This is to miss the point. The law was so based because there was no alternative in a fairly primitive and unusual society. Good faith was an ideal, then as now, and it was recognised, but that doesn’t mean it was universally observed. Study of the written facts suggests that the Borderers were no more truthful or reliable than other men; they had their own eccentric notions of honour, but stainless veracity was not essential to it in practice. Bishop Leslie no doubt had good reason for his opinion, but the records appear to contradict him. Still, there will always be those eager to accept his view of the Borderers; personally, I wouldn’t have trusted them round the corner.
Breaking a promise is one thing; deliberate betrayal and treachery are rather different, and it is said that these were uncommon. It is difficult to judge at this distance, but again a study of the records makes one cautious about accepting blanket statements. Hector of Harlaw, the Carleton brothers, Black Ormiston, and Richie Graham will be mentioned later; their behaviour provides food for thought on the subject.
Leslie is interesting on Border morality as applied to property and theft. “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.” Later he adds: “Besides, they think the art of plundering so very lawful, that they never say over their prayers more fervently, or have more devout recurrence to their beads and their rosaries, than when they have made an expedition.”
Sometimes one gets the impression that the good bishop secretly admired the Border reivers. At least he is careful to do them justice, and there may be a clue to his attitude in that passage where he notes approvingly: “Nor indeed have the Borderers, with such ready frenzy as many others of the country, joined the heretical secession from the common faith of the holy church.” Rascals they might be, but Leslie counted them among his flock. Possibly he had not heard the story of the visitor to Liddesdale who, finding no churches, demanded: “Are there no Christians here?” and received the reply, “Na, we’s a’ Elliots and Armstrangs.”
Apart from the spiritual side, we know some other things about the old Border character. One has to remember, in quoting travellers’ stories, that most of those who visited Scotland, for example, wrote of the country as a whole, and what they described may not hold good for the Marches. But Pope Pius II, who visited the country in his earlier years when he was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, made observations which are pertinent; he noted the generally poor condition of the country, and that the men were small, bold and forward in temper, while the women, “fair in complexion, comely and pleasing” were “not distinguished for their chastity, giving their kisses more readily than Italian women their hands”.
This was in the fifteenth century; fifty years later Pedro de Ayala, a Spaniard, found the women “courteous in the extreme … really honest, though very bold”. He thought they dressed better than English women, and were in absolute control of their houses.
Several writers testify to a boastful tendency in the Scots, and Sylvius noted that nothing pleased them more than to hear the English abused. An English physician who lived in Scotland in the 1540s found that it was not in nature for a Scot to love an Englishman, and we have plenty of evidence of mutual loathing on either side. John Carey thought the Scots “the most perverst and prowde nacion in the world”, and paid them a back-handed compliment: whoever found himself up against them, the Scots were “such a people as will soon find what is in him.”
Eure,9 an English Warden, said of his own Marchmen that they “envied the stranger”; outsiders were not welcomed on either side of the line, as many of the later English Wardens, who were not Borderers, found to their cost. But one learns to be cautious about accepting some of the English officials’ strictures on the Borderers at their full face value; they were doubtless sincere, but they were under severe pressures in their office, and in writing to London they tended to give full vent to their feelings. One detects a fine rising note of hysteria in John Carey’s correspondence, and in that of Eure, who never found his feet as a Warden. Henry Leigh, a lesser official, once observed, with feeling, that the Borderers “were no cripples of their tongues”; neither were their Wardens.
A marked characteristic of the Marchmen, seemingly at odds with Anglo-Scottish rivalry, was their peculiar sense of community which made the Borderland an entity. Over and above inter-marriage and blood kinship, there was a common heritage that seemed to unite English and Scot on the Border against the outside world; they under stood each other and, to use a modern cliché, shared common problems. C. P. Snow touched in one of his novels on the phenomenon of two enemies who felt somehow closer to each other than to their own supporters, and this was true of the Border people. At its extreme this feeling manifested itself in one English invasion, when English and Scottish Borderers, on opposite sides as part of their national armies, were seen talking to each other “within less than a spear’s length, but when aware that such intercourse was noticed, they commenced to run at each other, apparently with no desire to inflict serious injury.”10
Often to English Wardens it seemed that their subjects were more at home