Border Fury

England and Scotland at War 1296-1568

John Sadler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317865278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Border Fury provides a fascinating account of the period of Anglo-Scottish Border conflict from the Edwardian invasions of 1296 until the Union of the Crowns under James VI of Scotland, James I of England in 1603.

It looks at developments in the art of war during the period, the key transition from medieval to renaissance warfare, the development of tactics, arms, armour and military logistics during the period. All the key personalities involved are profiled and the typology of each battle site is examined in detail with the author providing several new interpretations that differ radically from those that have previously been understood.

Chapter 1
Flowers of the Forest

Here are two people almost identical in blood . . . the same in language and religion; and yet a few years of quarrelsome isolation – in comparison with the great historical cycle – have so separated their thoughts and ways, that not unions nor mutual dangers, not steamers or railways, nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.

R.L. Stevenson, Essays of Travel

There stands, in the market place of Selkirk, in the county of that name a fine bronze statue by Thomas Clapperton. The figure of a fifteenth-century borderer, albeit looking more like a Prussian cuirassier, holds aloft a captured English banner. Legend relates that of an eighty-strong company from the town which served on the fatal field at Flodden. Only one, a man named Fletcher, returned alive, his trophy the flag of the Macclesfield contingent, led by Sir Christopher Savage. Casting the hard-won spoils in front of his fellow citizens in the market place, the lonely survivor inspired the tradition of the Common Riding, an annual event where local horsemen parade the banners of trade and guild around the burgh before symbolically throwing them down.

The disaster at Flodden in 1513 has been the inspiration for a vast liturgy of romantic verse. The ballad ‘Flowers of the Forest’ recorded by Scott, though of no great antiquity in his day, captures the tone of lament:

We’ll hear nae mair lilting, at the eve milking;
Women and bairns are heartless and wae;
Sighing and moaning on ilka green loaming,
The flowers of the forest are a’ wede awee.¹

The sighing and moaning is almost certainly apocryphal; the borderers suffered few casualties on the field, led as they were by Lord Hume who cannily resisted his doomed monarch’s desperate pleas for his division, blooded but by no means decimated, to come to the aid of their fellows. Hume may or may not have previously reached an accommodation with his English counterpart Lord Dacre, but their actions would certainly suggest an understanding based on ruthless pragmatism. Whichever national army triumphed, fire and sword would likely descend on the other’s border country. Besides, a true borderer, whilst he might die for profit or family honour, saw little advantage in dying for his country.

The Bishop of Durham, writing shortly after the battle, supplies a far more grittily realistic assessment of (in this case) English borderers, though his observations could be just as easily applied to their Scottish contemporaries:

The borderers . . . be falser than Scottes, and have doon more harm at this tyme to our folkes than the Scottes dyd . . . I wolde all the orsemen in the bordours were in Fraunce with you for there schulde thay do moche good, where as here they doo noone, but muche harme, for, as I have wretyn byfore, thay never lyghted from thayr horses, but when the battaylis joynyd than felle thay to ryfelying and robbying aswelle on our sideas of the Scottes, and have taken moche goods besides horses and catelle. And over that thay tooke dyverse prisoners of ours, and delyveryd theym to the Scottes, so that our folks as moche feare the falsued of thaym as they do the Scottes.²

It is likely that the sixteenth-century inhabitants of Selkirk, or any other of the border towns on both sides of the line, would have had no difficulty in recognising themselves from that less-than-flattering description.

Being of mixed Anglo-Scottish descent, like so many who live in the border region, I may lay claim to a degree of impartiality. My first memories of the border dales are of camping trips with my father when I was a boy. We travelled in an ageing Series II Land Rover, whose uncompromising suspension gave a fair impression of a medieval cart. The border hills are narcotic in effect – once they’re in your blood, they are there for good; once you begin to delve into their human past, you’re hooked.

Tramping up Broad Law, Windygyle or The Grey Mare’s Tail, usually in the lashing rain, left an indelible impression, not just of cold and wet but of belonging, being accepted into a landscape unchanged and unchanging. Camping by Meggat or Uswayford was to open a window on a past whose echoes were all around, the landscapes soaked (usually in the most literal sense) in romance, from Arthur to Hotspur and Marmion.

The very names resonate with conflicts past: Bloody Bush, Mainslaughter Law, Foulbogskye, Woden Law, Wolf Rig, Shield on the Wall, Morebattle, Gallowhill and the Ninestanrig where wicked Lord Soulis, the Bluebeard of Liddesdale, whose atrocities finally stretched the understanding of his neighbours, met a very unpleasant end:

They rolled him up in a sheet of lead,
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall;
They plunged him in the cauldron red,
And melted him, lead and bones and all.³

Between Bond books I read the Reverend Borland’s Edwardian Border Raids and Reivers, a racy account of the riding surnames in the sixteenth century and became acquainted with Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, Kinmont Will Armstrong, the ‘Bold’ Buccleuch and Auld Wat of Harden, along with a host of others.

As a student I devoured The Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser, probably the best single-volume history of the subject and which, published in the mid-Seventies, spearheaded a revival of interest in the reivers. The author’s approach is very much ‘warts and all’ – he strips away the ‘Young Lochinvar’ gloss of the nineteenth-century romantics to show the life of the riding names as it was: very nasty, usually very poor and generally very short.

I was also of a school generation that was still likely to be inspired by Bruce and the Spider, Percy and Douglas and the other paladins of the age. This solid grounding, even if rooted in a jingoistic and frighteningly ‘incorrect’ era, led to a lifetime’s interest. That two nations, like Montagu and Capulet, with so much in common, spent so much time at war, no mere skirmishing either but bloody and relentless conflict, replete with ample atrocities, is the story of the ‘three hundred years war’. A war that has left a lasting divide in the hearts and minds of many, fuelled by the stylish propaganda of Scott and the other romantics, together with the less subtle appeal of the more recent ‘Braveheart’ mythology.

More recently, as one of those ‘anoraks’ whose concept of leisure is to dress in period costume and refight, though usually without bloodshed, historic battles (in my case those of the English Civil Wars under the aegis of the Sealed Knot Society), I am frequently reminded of the depth of feeling these encounters still engender, especially, it has to be said, on the Scottish side. I recall a very warm afternoon in June 1993, marching as part of the ‘Scots’ army down the main street of Linlithgow, a wise choice for the Scots were amply supplied with ale from the taverns lining the way, the ‘English’ markedly were not. These welcome libations were accompanied by martial exhortations and helpful advice on how to deal with those ‘English bastards’. This phenomenon does not occur as one moves to campaign further south.

The border is not a paper frontier. At several crossing points, perhaps most noticeably the Tweed at Coldstream, you are aware of an immediate cultural shift. The buildings on the Scottish side with their crow stepped gables exhibit a totally different architectural heritage, displaying far more French influence than English.

Even the term ‘border’ is open to debate. Most would regard the border country as comprising the two most northerly counties of England, Northumberland and what is now Cumbria, formerly Cumberland and Westmorland, together with the southerly Scottish counties of Berwick, Selkirk, Roxburgh and Peebles, with possibly Dumfries.

This great swathe of country running from the Solway in the west to the North Sea in the east takes in a wide mix of landscapes, a region moulded by the shifting glaciers of the last ice age which persisted until some 15,000 years ago. When the great thaw finally triumphed, the hills and valleys were humped and scored, nearly four-fifths soon covered in primeval forest, or wild wood, of oak, ash, elm and beech, teeming with game.

The colder shores of the North Sea have some of the finest beaches in Britain, bounded by a lowland plain from the coal measures of south-east Northumberland to the Tweed valley and the Merse, arguably the most fertile farmland in Europe. The broad sweep of the River Tweed now marks the border in the east, from the frontier bastide at Berwick past great fortresses such as Norham, formerly part of the Bishopric of Durham, and the crumbled motte at Wark.

Once inland the country begins to rise. The upland valleys of Coquetdale, Redesdale and North Tynedale wind up to the wild sweep of the Cheviot hills. This rolling sea of wind-tossed tussocks and peat hags signally failed to impress Tudor travellers like John Leland, writing in the 1530s – ‘craggi and stoni montanes’⁴ – a sentiment echoed by Camden, ‘lean, hungry and waste’.⁵ The view from the present visitors’ car park atop Carter Bar on the line of the A68 offers, at least on a clear day, a panoramic sweep of the middle marches territory, looking over the sculpted rise of the hills towards Jedburgh and Kelso.

On the Scottish side the southern uplands confront the Cheviots traversed by Liddesdale and Teviotdale, former haunts of the mosstroopers, Armstrongs, Elliots, Bells and Croziers. The grim fortress of Hermitage still lowers over Liddesdale, perhaps the single most potent monument to centuries of strife. West of the Cheviot is Bewcastle Waste, with the shattered bulk of the castle still standing. The border does not truly run east west but more south west to north east, on the English side guarded by the impressive bulk of Carlisle Castle. North of the Solway lie Eskdale and Annandale, formerly the Scottish West March, with the threap of the ‘Debatable Land’ lying between the two.

No two locations can really be said to be alike. The fertile reaches of the Till, winding past Etal and Ford, the river valley settled since antiquity, present a wholly different aspect to the upper reaches of Coquetdale where the hills crowd the narrowing glen and the thunder of artillery frequently creates a suitably warlike backdrop. The still mighty border fortresses, maintained and manicured, cannot entirely be compared with Bewcastle or Thirlwell, isolated, hacked and overgrown.

The visitor who searches for reminders of the border wars will not be disappointed. The forbidding nature of much of the country and the continued predominance of agriculture, a relatively sparse and stable population have combined to leave much of the landscape unchanged. Now there are roads where formerly there were none, even in Liddesdale and Teviotdale, which for centuries remained remote, inaccessible fastnesses, where the natives were far from friendly, ‘the beautiful valleys full of savages’⁶ as both were described. Much of the forestation has now gone, replaced by cultivation, and several of the towns on the Scottish side have a more recent industrial heritage based on the mill trade.

To glean an impression of the border country as it stood for most of the long years of the border wars we must imagine a landscape where barely any roads, or at least roadways we would now recognise as such, existed. Natural forest of oak and scrub alder covered much of the ground and a good deal of the land between was wet and generally impassable, the mosses impenetrable to all but those who knew the hidden pathways.

Castles, tower houses and peles still abound, such as Smailholm near Kelso, almost impossibly romantic in its cliff-top setting, and Hollows Tower near Canonbie, now restored and often incorrectly identified with Johnnie Armstrong. The battlefields at Heavenfield, Flodden, Otterburn, Hedgeley Moor and the Reidswire are marked for the visitor; others – Carham, Homildon, Ancrum Moor, Pinkie, Haddon Rigg – require more sleuthing.

From Berwick to the Solway is no more than 70 miles as the crow flies. The line of the border is nearer 120 miles, with the hump of the Cheviot massif rising to 2,500 feet at the highest point. By the mid-thirteenth century the governance of the region on both sides of the line became the function of the march wardens, indentured servants of their respective crowns whose role was to control the unruly inhabitants and defend their section of the frontier. This could, and not infrequently did, extend to a more proactive role. Warden raids or ‘rodes’ could be large-scale affairs with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of light border horses stiffened with a levy of foot ‘loons’ or garrison troops carrying out a wide sweep through the opposing march. Teviotdale and Annandale were both frequent targets.

The English East March comprised the districts of Norhamshire, Islandshire, Glendale and Bamburghshire. Norham, ‘the Queen of Border Fortresses’, was part of the County Palatine and thus a fief of the Prince Bishop, while the coastal flank was anchored on the great fortress of Berwick. Originally Scotland’s premier port and a flourishing royal burgh the town changed dramatically in character and appearance after the savage English assault of 1296, becoming a military outpost and a bone of contention between the two nations until it finally changed hands for the last time in 1482.

Lord Hunsdon, the military governor and East March Warden during Elizabeth’s reign,⁷ estimated the extent of his wardenry as 24 miles long and 16 miles broad, extending from the North Sea to the Hanging Stone in the foothills of the Cheviots. The Tweed provided the natural frontier, with Berwick, Norham and Wark as the principal fortresses and though Berwick was provided with splendid new walls in the latest Italianate style, the other holds were left to deteriorate during the sixteenth century as their importance declined.

Norham retains its imposing presence despite the ravages and thefts of time⁸ but Wark is almost totally decayed; only the remains of the motte survive. Though formidable in flood, the Tweed was usually easily fordable, with some seven or eight crossing places between Berwick and Norham. The Till bisects the March from north to south, with castles at Etal and Ford. The east coast was the favoured invasion route for armies forging north or south. William the Conqueror set the pattern in 1070 when, supported by a fleet hugging the coast, he launched a punitive raid through the Lothians to chastise Malcolm Canmore.

The English Middle March encompassed the high ground of the Cheviot and Carter Bar whilst also taking in mid Northumberland. The warden was based at Alnwick, dominated by the great stronghold of the Percys, with his lodging in the Abbey. The upland dales of Coquetdale, Redesdale and North Tynedale fell within his jurisdiction, together with their quarrelsome inhabitants. Each of the valleys had its own distinct character, with Coquetdale being decidedly less lawless than the other two, though much harried by riders from Liddesdale and Teviotdale. The upper reaches of the valley were guarded by the castle at Harbottle, another bastion that was allowed to fall into ruin as the sixteenth century progressed. The mosstroopers came by the Bowmont Water and over Cocklaw, following the reivers’ trails, spreading fire and pillage in their wake.

The English West March covered both Cumberland and Westmorland – now, since the dead hand of central bureaucracy did away with the latter, the confines of Cumbria. Westmorland played a relatively minor role in border strife. Kendal was a thriving wool town, Appleby Castle a Clifford hold. Carlisle was the principal city in the west; the great, red sandstone mass of the castle, stark, square and utterly uncompromising had been built as a challenge to the Scots and remained so, defying several determined sieges. The land frontier of the march ran for some 20 miles, bounded in the west by the waters of the Esk and towards the Middle March by the Liddel. The land was open moor rather than border hill country, the barren reaches of Bewcastle Waste a favoured reivers’ haunt. The ravaged remains of the castle do not reflect its importance, with other holds at Askerton, Naworth and Thirlwell.⁹ The warden maintained his office at Carlisle where he was aided by his deputy and a constable. The city was a local metropolis with, perhaps not entirely unsurprising, a brisk trade in stolen beasts and gear!

On the Scottish side the East March comprised the county or sheriffdom of Berwick, facing the English garrison in the town and separated from Haddingtonshire by the swelling Lammermuirs. The formidable hold of Hume Castle seemingly impregnable on its sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• 1 Flowers of the Forest
• 2 Sinews of War
• 3 Under the Hammer
• 4 The Lion Triumphant
• 5 The Longest Stick
• 6 'Nothing but their naked bodies'
• 7 The Disinherited
• 8 Neville's Cross
• 9 Landscape of War
• 10 Chevy Chase
• 11 'At Holmedon Met'
• 12 Sausages without Mustard
• 13 War in the North
• 14 Hedgeley Moor and Hexham
• 15 'This Sunne of York'
• 16 Flodden Field
• 17 The Road to Solway Moss
• 18 The Rough Wooing
• 19 The Two Queens
• 20 Last Years of the Frontier
• 21 The Steel Bonnets
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index