Between the Scottish Wars of Independence and the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the Border Reivers made the Anglo-Scottish Borders ring to the clash of steel, the thunder of hooves and the screams of bloody murder. The Reivers were a British phenomenon rather than a purely Scottish one because there were also English Reivers. On both sides of the Border they were professional cattle-thieves, merciless racketeers and plunderers. They were murderous pursuers of feuds who – allegedly – held little sacred except their pledged word. However, as light cavalry they were magnificent and their country’s vanguard in time of war.
The Reivers were the product of Anglo-Scottish conflict – intense at the end of the 13th century and at the beginning of the 14th century and intermittent thereafter – which impacted heavily on the socio-economic life of the Borders, often reducing the area to a wasteland. The prospect of renewed conflict offered little incentive to arable farming. Why plant crops if they might be burned before they could be harvested? The threat of political turbulence was a powerful incentive to pastoralism. Livestock, in turn, provided a strong stimulus to reiving (raiding or plundering), which became the principal business of all classes in the Borders: agricultural labourer, smallholder, gentleman farmer and peer of the realm alike. There was no social stigma attached to reiving. It was simply an accepted way of life.
The Border Reiver's credo was:
‘The freebooter ventures both life and limb
Good wife, and bairn, and every other thing;
He must do so, or else must starve and die,
For all his livelihood comes of the enemie.’
The wife of one famous Border Reiver would demonstrate that her larder was empty by serving him up his spurs on a plate instead of his dinner. The stark message was either mount up and go reiving or go hungry.
The Reiver went reiving mounted on his hobbler, a small sturdy pony, noted for its incredible stamina and capacity to cover great distances and difficult terrain at remarkable speed. On his head the Reiver would wear his ‘steill bonnet’ or steel bonnet, made to a variety of patterns by local smiths. While he might wear a mail coat, he was more likely to sport a ‘jak of plaite’, a quilted jacket of stout leather sewn with plates of metal or horn, which afforded almost as great protection as mail armour but was much lighter and permitted the wearer greater freedom of movement. Although the Reiver carried a variety of weapons – the cutting sword, the Jedburgh axe (an axe with a distinctive round cutting edge), the dagger and even early pistols – his preferred weapon was invariably the ‘lang spear’ or the Border lance.
Reiving was essentially a seasonal activity, the season lasting from September to February but activity tended to be heavily concentrated between Michaelmas (29 September) to Martinmas (11November). Between these dates the ground was dry and the cattle and horses were strong enough for the drive. After February oats to feed the Reivers’ horses were too expensive and the nights were too short for major raids.
Reiving was not a continuation of war by other means. It was primarily a way of earning a living. Scottish Reivers did not always choose to raid across the English Border. They were just as likely to raid other Scots. Scottish and English Borderers could even combine to raid on either side of the Border. The target of Reiving could be anyone outside a person's family or kinship. Raids were meticulously planned like military operations. Some raids consisted of large groups of men and might last for days. More modest raids might be directed at soft targets such as a small farmer or a widow and might involve no more than a short moonlight ride, a quick plunder and a dash home.
Kinmont Willie Armstrong, Wat Scott of Harden and Geordie Burn were three of the most celebrated Reivers. Kinmont Willie prided himself on his large scale raiding, targeting whole areas rather than individual farms or villages, at the head of some 300 Reivers, known as ‘Kinmont’s bairns’. One of the most famous incidents in Border history was the rescue of Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle in April 1596. Wat Scott, a contemporary of Kinmont Willie’s and involved in Kinmont Willie’s rescue, was another notorious Reiver. Returning one night from a raid, Scott passed a haystack and muttered, ‘Aye, if ye had fower legs ye wouldnae stand there lang.’ Sir Walter Scott, the creator of the modern European novel, took pride in being one of his descendants.
The night before he was hanged in 1596, Geordie Burn admitted that he had ‘lived long enough to do so many villainies as he had done … that he had lain with above forty men's wives, what in England, what in Scotland; and that he had killed seven Englishmen with his own hand, cruelly murdering them; that he had spent his whole time in whoring, drinking, stealing and taking deep revenge for slight offences’.’
It is difficult not to admire the equanimity with which Border Reivers faced death. ‘Armstrong’s Goodnight’ ascribes the following words to Sandy Armstrong on the eve of his execution in 1605:
‘I hope ye’re a my friends as yet,
Goodnight, and joy be wi’ ye all.’
The Border Reivers have been accused of being irreligious. A 17th-century English traveller in Liddesdale was astonished by the lack of churches. ‘Are there no Christians here?’ he enquired. ‘Na,’ was the reply. ‘We’s a’ Elliotts an Armstrangs’. Yet, Border Reivers never prayed more fervently than on the eve of a raid.
With the exception of the Scottish Highlands, the Borders were the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the rule of law. That the Borders were ungovernable was an affront to Royal authority in the early modern period. Improving Anglo-Scottish relations before the Union of the Crowns, produced co-operation with the authorities on the English side of the Border and resulted in the region becoming conspicuously more peaceful.
However, between the death of Elizabeth I and the proclamation of James VI and I in March 1603, Scottish Reivers (principally the Grahams, the Armstrongs and the Elliots) launched the massive ‘Ill Week’ raids into Cumbria, professing to believe that when a monarch died the laws of the land were automatically suspended until the new king was proclaimed.
James VI and I, who aspired to rule a new entity called Great Britain, was furious with his Scottish subjects for depriving his new English subjects in Cumbria of some 1,280 cattle and 3,840 sheep and goats. James issued a proclamation against ‘all rebels and disorderly persons’, stating that ‘no supply be given them, their wives or bairns and that they be prosecuted with fire and sword’. James required all who were guilty of the ‘foul and insolent outrages lately committed in the Borders to submit themselves to his mercy before 20th June under penalty of being excluded from it forever’. He also decreed that the Anglo-Scottish Borders would henceforward be called ‘the Middle Shires’ instead.
The Union of the Crowns greatly facilitated the completion of the process of pacifying the Borders. In 1605 James established a joint border commission that embarked upon a draconian policy of rooting out gangsterism. In the first year of the commission’s existence it executed 79 individuals. In the years which followed scores were hanged. Others were encouraged to leave and serve as mercenaries in the armies of continental Europe. Others – the Armstrongs and the Grahams were singled out for special treatment – were banished to Ireland. Eventually, they were to hold the outposts of the Plantation in south-west Ulster. Borders surnames – Johnston, Armstrong, Elliott and Beattie, in that order – dominate the muster rolls of 17th-century Fermanagh. The three commonest British surnames in Fermanagh today are still Johnston, Armstrong and Elliott. Other common British surnames in the county – such as Bell, Foster, Graham, Irvine, Kerr, Maxwell, Nixon, and Scott – also have their origins in the Borders.
In 1607 James – somewhat prematurely – boasted that ‘the Middle Shires’ had ‘become the navel or umbilic of both kingdoms, planted and peopled with civility and riches’. However, by the early 1620s the Borders were so peaceful that the Crown was able to scale down its operations.
Some view the Border Reivers as loveable rogues – easier to do after the passage of a few centuries than it would have been at the time. Others have compared them to the Mafia or the bootleggers of the Prohibition era in the United States. G. M. Trevelyan, the last of the great Whig historians and son of G. O. Trevelyan, the Whig historian and politician who represented the Borders in the House of Commons, saw an analogy with the world of Homer’s Odyssey: ‘Like the Homeric Greeks, they were cruel, coarse savages, slaying each other as beasts of the forest, and yet they were also poets who could express in the grand style the inexorable fate of the individual man and woman.’
Are you a Border Reiver descendent?
Armstrong (Armstrang)
Beattie
Bell
Burn(s) (Bourne)
Charlton (Carleton)
Carlisle
Carnaby
Carr
Carruthers
Chamberlain
Collingwood
Crisp
Croser (Crosar, Crozier)
Dacre
Davison
Dixon
Dodd
Douglas
Dunn (e)
Elliot (Eliott, Elwood) *
Fenwick
Forster (Forrester)
Graham (Graeme)
Hall
Hedley
Hetherington (Hetherton, Atherton)
Heron
Hume (Home)
Irvine (Irving, Urwen)
Johnstone (Johnston, Johnstoun)
Kerr (Carr, Carre)
Laidlaw
Little
Lowther
Maxwell
Milburn
Musgrave
Nixon (Nicksoun)
Noble
Ogle
Oliver
Potts
Pringle
Radcliffe
Reade
Ridley
Robson
Routledge
Rutherford
Salkeld
Scott
Selby
Shaftoe
Simpson
Storey
Tait
Taylor
Trotter
Turnbull
Wake
Watson
Wilson
Woodrington
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