Borderers who changed the course of history...
Journalist and historian Dr. David Hume travels in search of ancestral links to the Border Reivers...
 
Set on a Borders hilltop looking towards Coldstream, Hume Castle and a small scattering of houses nearby has an imposing position. The Humes were once the Wardens of the East Marches, their task to provide a semblance of law and order in an area not renowned for its civility.

For all Humes, this is where the story starts, and although I cannot say when it started for my own family - something which I probably share with many fellow Ulster-Scots in relation to their own ancestors - I do know that by the 1650s some of them were to be found in County Antrim. For many Borders families, a westward movement around the same time brought many sons and brothers to Ulster.

The Border which many of them left had always been a frontier; was that not, after all, what Hadrians Wall had been about? While the Romans built the wall to keep out the Picts from their more civilised society, in medieval times the Borders would be the first point of contact for invading armies from England or Scotland. The land, laid waste through such incursions, gave birth to a tenacious breed of people on both sides of the line, people who could not depend on farming because the moment an invader appeared the crops, livestock and livelihood were lost.

And so were born the Riding Clans, or Reivers. Their other name, the Steel Bonnets, gives an immediate picture to those who have never heard of them. These were not gentlemen who cantered across the countryside in search of foxes or hares of a Saturday afternoon. The Reivers went out in search of plunder, cattle and sheep; in doing so they earned their spurs and kept the larders full at home.

Living on the Borders was not a pleasant existence in those times, and for security the borderers grouped together into their clans. Armstrongs and Elliotts, Grahams and Irvines, Lindsays and Kerrs were among them. On the English side of the Border constables were brought in from further south so that they had no connection with those already there and could, it was believed, police them better.

On the Scots side it was believed that those who knew the Reivers would have more sway over them, which is how the Humes ended up as Wardens of the East March. Like all Wardens, they doubtless turned a blind eye at times, but the system which was established served the area for generations.

One of the customs was that of the Hot Trod. This meant that if someone came across the border and stole your cattle, you had the right to follow them within a few days to recover your property. The posse which was gathered - and all those in the first settlement you came to were bound by law to assist - raced forward with one rider at the front carrying a piece of burning turf on a spear. In the Hot Trods and the Reiving, many lost their lives.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of England he decided to end the embarrassment of the middle of his joint kingdom being a no man’s land, and he set about the ‘pacification’ of the Borders. This involved hanging and transporting notorious Borders families.

The Grahams, among the worst offenders, were mercilessly hunted down. To avoid detection, many changed their name by spelling it backwards: hence we find a few Mahargs/Mehargs in Ulster today. The plan did not entirely work, for George McDonald Fraser in his excellent book ‘The Steel Bonnets’ points out that the most prevalent name in the Carlisle phone directory after the Second World War was Graham - proving above all else, perhaps, the resilience of the Borderer.

The Borders are different now than they were in the generation of the Riding Clans. But something of the past is recalled in the various Common Ridings that are held in places such as Selkirk, Jedburgh, Kelso and elsewhere, fascinating pageants which reach into the collective, communal past.

In an excellent study of the Selkirk Common Riding, (The Mother Town. Civic Ritual, Symbol and Experience in the Borders of Scotland, Oxford, 1994) Gwen Kennedy Neville outlines how the festivities get underway at an early hour, around 5am in fact, and continue throughout the day in question, drawing exiles from across the world.

“In the drama that unfolds early on the common riding morning, the most spectacular aspect is the appearance of four or five hundred horses and riders following the royal standard bearer down High Street, across the river, and around the boundaries of the old town’s common lands. The horses are led outward by the town’s silver band...After the band comes the stream of walkers in a pattern of segments, each behind the flag of a ceremonial organisation....these then are followed by the town citizenry overflowing into the streets in a flood of revelry and singing.”

“...the power and significance of these hours pervade the town’s life throughout the year and over generations...” she notes.  An important element in the ceremonial in towns such as Selkirk is the paying tribute to the fallen of the Battle of Flodden, which took place in 1513 and saw the Scots defeated and their king killed by the invading English. Memories run long in the Borders. Indeed, in the period of the Reivers, it is clear that memories of slights or offences could be nursed for some time; Geordie Burn, prior to being hanged in 1596, confessed that he had spent a life of “whoring, drinking, stealing and taking deep revenge for slight offences”

The memory of the Reivers is clear in Galashiels, where a fine monument of a rider on his horse greets the visitor. It is an imposing statue and conjures up a romantic image of the past. There is, in fact, a romance about the Reivers now that was not so apparent at the time of their existence. It was often too tough and brutal a time for that.

But it produced a people who were tenacious and hardy. Had it not done so we would not have seen history develop as it did in the Ulster Plantation or in the American colonies.

Author Rory Fitzpatrick refers to God’s frontiersmen, who manned the borders of other areas too; the Ulster Plantation and the west of Pennsylvania among them. In the latter they formed a buffer between the Quaker authorities and the Indians, with the former quick to criticise the excesses of the same people President Theodore Roosevelt labelled ‘a stern and truculent race’.
They were above all else survivors. They were also the perfect group of people to send to tame a frontier. The Lord Deputy of Ireland in the early 1600s referred to the Grahams when he said that “They are now dispersed, and when they shall be placed upon any land together, the next country will find them ill neighbours, for they are a fracticious and naughty people”. He could, of course, have been referring to any or all of the Border clans, none of whom were perfect, not even the Humes.

But they had some good points too. They had a curious sense of loyalty, outlined by one English spy in the 16th century. He noted that two Border thieves whom he employed as guides ‘would not care (hesitate) to steal, and yet they would not betray any man that trusts in them, for all the gold in Scotland or in France‘.

Their tenacity also helped sustain the Ulster Plantation through dangerous times in the 17th century, and helped the founding of the United States.
George MacDonald Fraser draws a wonderful analogy from recent decades in his ‘Steel Bonnets’, noting that at the inauguration of Richard Nixon as US President, he was flanked by outgoing president Lyndon Johnson and also the evangelist Billy Graham; “To anyone familiar with Border history it was one of those historical coincidences which send a little shudder through the mind: in that moment, thousands of miles and centuries in time away from the ‘Debatable Land’, the threads came together again....Lyndon Johnson’s is a face and figure that everyone in Dumfriesshire knows; the lined, leathery Northern head and rangy, rather loose-jointed frame belong to one of the commonest Border types...Billy Graham has frequently addressed his Scottishness, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, since there are more Grahams on the southern side of the line than on the northern, but again the face is familiar.”

“Richard Nixon, however, is the perfect example. The blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, and the whole air of dour hardness are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall...it is difficult to think of any face that would fit better under a steel bonnet....” MacDonald Fraser tells us.

Nixon is, of course, among the presidents who are believed to be of Ulster descent, bringing the matter into an Ulster sphere of understanding as well.
As you drive across the Borders today it is not hard to imagine how the landscape created a dour and blunt outlook on life. There is a sparseness there which suggests hardship, even in the summertime.

Standing at Hume Castle as the dusk fell one summer evening, I eyed the hills beyond and imagined another time, when the Warden might have listened for the sound of hooves or watched for the warnng beacons that were lighted to alert the authorities of raid, and would have known that steel bonnets had been donned and clans were riding across the Border again.

I wondered as I stood on the battlements what persuaded some of his and my clansmen to set their sights not on the borderlands to the south, but to follow the setting sun to the west, where they and many others would write a new chapter in the history of Ulster...