The Candlemass Road

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IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF JOSEPH BAIN EDITOR OF THE CALENDAR OF BORDER PAPERS

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You may wonder why my Lord Dacre, who had fair lands in the far south, such as this where I live out the winter of my time, should keep his home in such a den of strife and iniquity. But he was one who craved a hard life, and must be doing; it was in him to dare, and if there had been no Cumberland I believe he would have made his bed in Tartary. Moreover, his house had held their own on that stark border three hundred years, through the bitter Scotch wars in which the people of the Marches had their tempering – and this, I am assured, was why they must continue to live like warring nomads, for it was bred in their nature. He would not shrink from it, not for all the gold and quiet of the south country, which he might have had in plenty. “For I am Dacre,” he would say. “Shift me an ye can.”

When a man has such neighbours he goes to bed late and lies not long in the morning, but my lord throve on it as it were sport. And being an expert borderer and skilly soldier, he gave so much better than he took that in his last years we began to have some quiet in the lands about Askerton, though the rest of the frontier corrupted by the day. Even the hardiest freebooters, Armstrongs of Mangerton and Whithaugh, Elliots of Stobs and the Park, and Grahams of Brackenhill and Eden, began to look for their living otherwhere than on Dacre’s ground, and rode wide of the Red Bull’s pen. It was a grisly A.B.C. that he learned them. I have seen his great gallows beyond the barnekin, four ells high and four across the beam, loaded with such a cargo of dead thieves as would have gorged me every crow from Kelso to Caldbeck, and not a day but there was fresh fodder for them, swinging in the cold fell wind.

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