All
I knew was that, despite the persistence of its boundaries, and apart from two
temporary Roman camps, the Debatable Land had been uninhabited from the end of
the Bronze Age to the age of the Grahams and Armstrongs. Two place names –Wobrethill
and Bettalach- might refer to an aboriginal
British population, but the assortment of material evidence was
ridiculously meagre: a rein-guide, a jug, a buried hoard and two drowned cows.
In the face of this silence, there was nothing more to be said. At that distance in time, the historical vista was as impenetrable as the moors and mosses when a Liddesdale drow* had descended. The vast gap in the archeological record was a discovery in itself, but there were no human voices to explain the emptiness, only the river of the ‘loud dale’, proclaiming the ancient boundary with its noise.
*A cold damp wetting mist; a persistent small drizzling rain.
Stob and Staik
The first recorded trouble in the Debatable Land concerned neither sheep but the migratory animals which live on the border itself. ‘Have you gone fishing?’ is one of the questions most asked by local visitors to my house. The idea that fishing rights might be devolved to the resident heron, cormorant or otter is not one that should be lightly expressed. Five hundred years ago, it would have been a mark of insanity, and perhaps still is.
The salmon which thrashed to their way up the Esk and the Liddel every year in wildly varying numbers to their spawning grounds came close to causing war between Scotland and England. Some time before 1474, when the matter was discussed at Westminster, the poor cottagers who lived among the ruins of Roman Netherby constructed a ‘firsh garth’ across the Esk. Often described as a dike of sand and pebbles – which the Esk would easily have demolished- the garth was probably a dead hedge or a net held in place by stakes,. Since the opposite bank lay in the unpopulated Debatable Land, the garth-builders met with no resistance.
That spring, while the people of Netherby netted, stabbed and scooped up the frustrated fish, the monks of Canonbie and the people of upper Eskdale waiting in vain for the salmon to arrive. Drawing the obvious conclusion, they trooped downstream to dismantle the fish garth and struck the first blow in a dispute which sputtered on for nearly three hundred years.
In the days when protein was harder to come by, fish were a vital resource. It s because of fish that the boundaries of the Debatable Land were first surveyed and recorded in 1494 and 1510 – and no one found anything odd in the report that before the Battle of Flodden, James IV, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, had proposed to fight in single combat for ‘the Towne of Berwicke and the Fisigarthis on the West Marches.’
The first permanent occupation of the Debatable Land in over two thousand years was a murkier business and the motives of those involved are harder to grasp. The only ‘fishing’ associated with the reivers is the practice of ‘scumfishing’ (etymologically unrelated) which meant surrounding a pele tower with a smoldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants. The ostensible cause of the incursions was an increase in human population and the system of partible inheritance. As in many upland parts of England, property was divided equally among male heirs. When the population grew, the system of clans or surnames struggled to cope with this fragmentation of estates. A young man who saw his future livelihood reduced to a thatched hovel and a sodden field, and who had tasted the excitement of war and profited from its spoils, was likely to question his allegiance to a ‘laird’, who might be nothing but an old farmer with a house built of stone and a bloated sense of his own importance.
The ‘broken men’ or ‘clanless loons’ who refused to recognize a laird’s authority might retain their surnames and even start their own branch of ‘grayne’. If they were strong in numbers, they would be outlaws only in name. The romantic notion of underlying loyalty to a hoary can chief is misleading: this was a relatively fluid system system, supported by common Border law rather than by the whims of a feudal lord. But there was something shockingly modern in the irruption of reiving families into the Debatable land.
In 1521, the Scottish author of A History of Greater Britain wrote of ‘terra inhabitata’ between England and Scotland. He must have seen or heard about the Debatable Land in the last days of its independence. By the time his book was published, men who did not share the veneration of their forefathers were creeping along the Esk and encroaching in the ancient boundaries. Ignoring the law which prohibited the erection of any permanent structure, they came like colonists to a new frontier. Although the deeper mosses and the hilly interior remained empty, the fringes were soon dotted with crofts, and ploughs tore into grasslands which had remained uncultivated for countless generations.
These interlopers felt allegiance neither to Scotland nor to England but their encroachment on the Debatable Land inevitably had international implications. A Scottish army had recently invaded England. The plan had been to distract Henry VIII from his attack on northern France, in accordance with the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland. The result was the Battle of Flodden (1513), at which James IV and thousands of his Scottish soldiers lost their lives.
This military disaster still looms large in the national consciousness, but it was spectacularly untypical of Anglo-Scottish relations. Fourteen years after the defeat of Edward II by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn, Scottish independence and the existing border had been recognized by the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton (1328). When James IV invaded England in 1513, he was breaking a more recent treaty of “Perpetual Peace’ signed with England in 1502. Until Henry VIII began to devastate the borderlands there was hostility but little open warfare. The battles of Otterburn (1388), Sark (1448) and Flodden (1513 were border raids rather than full-scale invasions. Some Scottish have tentatively suggested that more attention should be paid to ‘evidence of peaceful Anglo-Scottish accommodation and exchange.’
Before and after Flodden, both countries pursued a defense policy of harrying and dissuasion. It was cheaper to launch punitive raids than to maintain a barrier of fortresses from the Solway Firth to the North Sea. (A later proposal to build a new Hadrian’s Wall on the borderline was never seriously considered.) Since the Debatable Land was respected by the borderers themselves, it had proved to be a useful buffer zone. The ancient local law had repeatedly confirmed by parliamentary decrees: ‘the Landes called Batabil Landes or Threpelandes’ were not to be occupied in any way, ‘nor by lande nor by water, except in times of truce, and even then ‘as it hath been done in time of other truces’, there was to be no ‘pyndying’ or ‘parcage’ (impounding or penning of livestock).
The illegal settlements of the 1510s were therefore something quite new. They might have been the effect of increased population, but they also suggest a breakdown in the moral order. The occupation of the Debatable Land began not long after the catastrophe at Flodden. Armies did not always dutifully disperse when the fighting was over: their wages consisted largely of plunder and some of the worst acts of violence were committed a long way from the battlefield. A group of Armstrongs who fought as mercenaries might have decided to maximize their profits on the way home from Flodden. In the valley of the Esk, they found a fertile realm naturally defended by the river and its cliffs and conveniently devoid of other human beings.
The Debatable Land; The Lost World between Scotland & England by Graham Robb; Norton, 2018
In the face of this silence, there was nothing more to be said. At that distance in time, the historical vista was as impenetrable as the moors and mosses when a Liddesdale drow* had descended. The vast gap in the archeological record was a discovery in itself, but there were no human voices to explain the emptiness, only the river of the ‘loud dale’, proclaiming the ancient boundary with its noise.
*A cold damp wetting mist; a persistent small drizzling rain.
Stob and Staik
The first recorded trouble in the Debatable Land concerned neither sheep but the migratory animals which live on the border itself. ‘Have you gone fishing?’ is one of the questions most asked by local visitors to my house. The idea that fishing rights might be devolved to the resident heron, cormorant or otter is not one that should be lightly expressed. Five hundred years ago, it would have been a mark of insanity, and perhaps still is.
The salmon which thrashed to their way up the Esk and the Liddel every year in wildly varying numbers to their spawning grounds came close to causing war between Scotland and England. Some time before 1474, when the matter was discussed at Westminster, the poor cottagers who lived among the ruins of Roman Netherby constructed a ‘firsh garth’ across the Esk. Often described as a dike of sand and pebbles – which the Esk would easily have demolished- the garth was probably a dead hedge or a net held in place by stakes,. Since the opposite bank lay in the unpopulated Debatable Land, the garth-builders met with no resistance.
That spring, while the people of Netherby netted, stabbed and scooped up the frustrated fish, the monks of Canonbie and the people of upper Eskdale waiting in vain for the salmon to arrive. Drawing the obvious conclusion, they trooped downstream to dismantle the fish garth and struck the first blow in a dispute which sputtered on for nearly three hundred years.
In the days when protein was harder to come by, fish were a vital resource. It s because of fish that the boundaries of the Debatable Land were first surveyed and recorded in 1494 and 1510 – and no one found anything odd in the report that before the Battle of Flodden, James IV, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, had proposed to fight in single combat for ‘the Towne of Berwicke and the Fisigarthis on the West Marches.’
The first permanent occupation of the Debatable Land in over two thousand years was a murkier business and the motives of those involved are harder to grasp. The only ‘fishing’ associated with the reivers is the practice of ‘scumfishing’ (etymologically unrelated) which meant surrounding a pele tower with a smoldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants. The ostensible cause of the incursions was an increase in human population and the system of partible inheritance. As in many upland parts of England, property was divided equally among male heirs. When the population grew, the system of clans or surnames struggled to cope with this fragmentation of estates. A young man who saw his future livelihood reduced to a thatched hovel and a sodden field, and who had tasted the excitement of war and profited from its spoils, was likely to question his allegiance to a ‘laird’, who might be nothing but an old farmer with a house built of stone and a bloated sense of his own importance.
The ‘broken men’ or ‘clanless loons’ who refused to recognize a laird’s authority might retain their surnames and even start their own branch of ‘grayne’. If they were strong in numbers, they would be outlaws only in name. The romantic notion of underlying loyalty to a hoary can chief is misleading: this was a relatively fluid system system, supported by common Border law rather than by the whims of a feudal lord. But there was something shockingly modern in the irruption of reiving families into the Debatable land.
In 1521, the Scottish author of A History of Greater Britain wrote of ‘terra inhabitata’ between England and Scotland. He must have seen or heard about the Debatable Land in the last days of its independence. By the time his book was published, men who did not share the veneration of their forefathers were creeping along the Esk and encroaching in the ancient boundaries. Ignoring the law which prohibited the erection of any permanent structure, they came like colonists to a new frontier. Although the deeper mosses and the hilly interior remained empty, the fringes were soon dotted with crofts, and ploughs tore into grasslands which had remained uncultivated for countless generations.
These interlopers felt allegiance neither to Scotland nor to England but their encroachment on the Debatable Land inevitably had international implications. A Scottish army had recently invaded England. The plan had been to distract Henry VIII from his attack on northern France, in accordance with the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland. The result was the Battle of Flodden (1513), at which James IV and thousands of his Scottish soldiers lost their lives.
This military disaster still looms large in the national consciousness, but it was spectacularly untypical of Anglo-Scottish relations. Fourteen years after the defeat of Edward II by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn, Scottish independence and the existing border had been recognized by the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton (1328). When James IV invaded England in 1513, he was breaking a more recent treaty of “Perpetual Peace’ signed with England in 1502. Until Henry VIII began to devastate the borderlands there was hostility but little open warfare. The battles of Otterburn (1388), Sark (1448) and Flodden (1513 were border raids rather than full-scale invasions. Some Scottish have tentatively suggested that more attention should be paid to ‘evidence of peaceful Anglo-Scottish accommodation and exchange.’
Before and after Flodden, both countries pursued a defense policy of harrying and dissuasion. It was cheaper to launch punitive raids than to maintain a barrier of fortresses from the Solway Firth to the North Sea. (A later proposal to build a new Hadrian’s Wall on the borderline was never seriously considered.) Since the Debatable Land was respected by the borderers themselves, it had proved to be a useful buffer zone. The ancient local law had repeatedly confirmed by parliamentary decrees: ‘the Landes called Batabil Landes or Threpelandes’ were not to be occupied in any way, ‘nor by lande nor by water, except in times of truce, and even then ‘as it hath been done in time of other truces’, there was to be no ‘pyndying’ or ‘parcage’ (impounding or penning of livestock).
The illegal settlements of the 1510s were therefore something quite new. They might have been the effect of increased population, but they also suggest a breakdown in the moral order. The occupation of the Debatable Land began not long after the catastrophe at Flodden. Armies did not always dutifully disperse when the fighting was over: their wages consisted largely of plunder and some of the worst acts of violence were committed a long way from the battlefield. A group of Armstrongs who fought as mercenaries might have decided to maximize their profits on the way home from Flodden. In the valley of the Esk, they found a fertile realm naturally defended by the river and its cliffs and conveniently devoid of other human beings.
The Debatable Land; The Lost World between Scotland & England by Graham Robb; Norton, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment