A LAND OF UNREST.*
ON the character of the Marchmen, over whom the English and Scottish Lord Wardens exercised a somewhat intermittent control, Mr. Pease writes with an enthusiasm which many of his readers will share. Neither the virtues nor the faults of the Borderers were such as greatly commend themselves to more civilized communities, but the congratulations we so often offer to ourselves on the change which the district has undergone are not always well founded. Mr. Pease claims for the Borderers "a splendidly hardy Spartan type of character. . . . The wild land has been the fruitful mother of a wild, stern chivalry." They were absolutely faithful to their word, to their chief, and to those who placed confidence in them. It was said of them by a contemporary that " they would not bewray any man that trust in them for all the gold in Scotland and France." When Sir Robert Ker, the Scottish Warden, was slain at a Border meeting in 1511, one of the murderers found, as t'e thought, a place of security near York. He was traced, how- ever, by two of Kees followers and put to death in his turn. His slayers made their escape carrying the head with them, and it was exposed at the Cross of Edinburgh. For the most part, however, a Borderer's fury ended with the death or seizure of his foe. No prisoner sustained any ill-usage at the hands of his captors. He was at once put to ransom, and if, when the time of payment came, the money could not be raised, the released prisoner "would at once surrender himself." Mr. Pease tells a striking story of Border persistence which he heard from one of the hero's family. Barty of the Comb, who lived about the end of the seventeenth century, found one morning that his sheep were missing. "Forthwith he went up to the neighbouring pele of his friend (Jot-bit Jock, to inform him of the loss. ',Ay,' said Cos-bit Jock, Scotland
By Howard
ha' them, dootless.' " The two friends at ()nee set off, but losing the track of the sheep they determined to content themselves with an equivalent in kind. They "lifted" the pick of the best flock of Scots wethers they knew of and started homewards. They were soon overtaken by two ,good Scottish swordsmen, and Barty showed his modera- tion by offering to give up half his booty, though he refused to return home " toom-handed." In the fight Corbit Jock was at once slain, while Barty had a sword run through his thigh. By a sudden wrench of his body he was able to snap the blade in two, and then "with a mighty back- handed sweep of the sword" he caught his assailant in the neck, "gaffing his heid to spang alang the heather like an inion."
By this time the second Scot had slain Corbit Jock, but the victor was instantly despatched by Barty, who then collected the swords, shouldered his dead friend, and drove off all the wethers in front of him. The Border women were not inferior in courage to the men. "Thus when a Milburn, proceeding
to settle a little difference with another Borderer, called to his wife, 'Wife, bring me out a clean sark it sail niver be said that the bluid of the Milburns ran down upon foul linen,' she promptly obeyed, and stood watching the combat with the dis- carded ' sark' upon her arm." It must be noted, however, that Mr. Pease's estimate of Border chivalry is hardly borne out by an extract given in an appendix from an account by a French gentleman of the barbarities practised by the Scots on their English prisoners in the campaign of 1548-9. At least it can only apply to prisoners of the same country taken in local forays. Where England was 2oncerned, "certainly the Scots were bitter haters, and as certainly they had just
cause for hate."
The Scottish side of the frontier line offered special tempta- tion to the English Borderer.
"The great vale of the Tweed suggests fertility, in strong contrast to the barrenness of the Coquet, the Rode, and the 'North Tyne. . . . To-day lambs will make' five shillings more through the winter if pastured on the north side of the Tweed ; potatoes will bring in a greater return per ton and wheat per boll -when grown upon the Soots side of the Border river. The rich Old Red Sandstone is the root cause of it,' so a practical Northum- brian farmer, a lessee of many acres, assured the writer."
'Those who try experiments in land legislation do not always take enough thought of geological differences. Nor was it only in having better land to raid that the English Borderers had the advantage over their neighbours. They enjoyed -comparative freedom from intestine quarrels. "Scots and English alike were inbred thieves; but the feuds that broke out between the Scots and Kers, and Kers and Elliots, and the Maxwells and Johnstones, must often have sadly hampered their activities, and again the heads of the great Scottish clans upon the marches were far oftener at variance with their sovereign than was the case on the southern Border, for the Scots Borderers in general were very loose in their alliance to him whom they termed occasionally in contempt 'the King of Fife.'" It was difficult to get any man to serve on a jury in a capital case, as a hostile verdict was sufficient to saddle those who gave it with a "deadly feud." The Law of Evidence was greatly simplified in cases touching life or limb, since no proof could be admitted by an Englishman against a Scot or by a Scot against an English- man "save only by the body of a man." - The only exception to this ordeal were the Kings of England and Scotland and their heirs and the Bishops of St. Andrews and Durham. Other ecclesiastics were allowed to be represented by a champion, but in the event of their champion's defeat they were liable to lose their own beads. It is remarkable that trial by battle should so long have been regarded as a means of bringing the parties before the immediate judgment of God, in face of the many instances where the victory must plainly bave gone to the stronger combatant.
Between the two English marches, Northumberland, or the Northern March, and Cumberland, or the Western March, lay the "Debatable Land," a strip of territory, as most commonly estimated, only eight miles long by four broad, lying between the rivers Sark and Esk. Of this Debatable Land, though the English Warden says in 1517, "There is no strife for the bounds of the same," occasions of strife were abundantly pro-
vided in other ways. It was the custom for Scots and English alike to pasture their cattle there from sunrise to sunset, but not to hold "stub and staik," i.e., to haveli permanent house there or to keep cattle there at night. If either of these conditions were broken the Wardens of either realm had the right "to burn, destroy, waste, take and drive away" all goods and cattle "so wilfully kept under cover of night." If the men and goods were found in the houses thus illegally set up they might be taken prisoners, but if they had got out of their houses the men were free, though the houses might be burnt and the goods forfeited. And if any subject of either realm carried away any of these houses or any crops grown upon the ground "upon wanes, carts, or horsebacks," they became the property of anyone who seized them. If, however, they were taken out of the wagons or carts before the seizure was made, there was no forfeiture. The penalty was only inflicted in the case of goods actually in transit. This limited ownership only extended to the crops growing upon the land and to the right of pasture. The English Warden and the Scots Warden each claimed the land itself for his own sovereign. " ' For neither will I,' wrote Lord Dacre in 1550 to the Privy Council, suffer the Warden of Scotland to answer for it, because I will not allow it to be Scotland, nor will they on the contrary consent that it shall be England.'" The ownership of the Debatable Land remained contested in this way till 1552, when two com- missioners on the part of the King of England and two on the part of the Queen of Scotland, "assisted by an envoy from France," awarded the western part to England and the eastern part to Scotland, the division being based on the very sensible ground that "the inhabitants of the western part inclined more to be subjects of England, and the inhabitants of the eastern part inclined more to be subjects of Scotland." Outside the Debatable Land proper there long remained "certain small threap lands,' debatable or disputed tracts," the nationality of which remained doubtful even up to the time of the Ordnance Survey. This complicated system of law was superseded in 1603 by one simple enactment that "if any English steal in Scotland or any Scotsman steal in England any goods or cattels amounting to the value of 12d. he shall be punished by death."
There is abundance of interesting matter in Mr. Pease's volume on which we have not touched, and we may end our notice "with a quaint illustration of the usual fate of the Borderer in the old days, who rarely died 'like a cow' in his bed. As we commented once upon the excess of the names of women over men on the headstones in the churchyard at Bewcastle, the sexton responded drily, 'What happened the men ? Wey, the men were a' hangit at weary Carlisle 1'"
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