Читать книгу The Steel Bonnets - George Fraser MacDonald - Страница 19

Like so many warlike people, the Borderers were sports enthusiasts, and still are. The little Scottish towns, with their small catchment areas, produce Rugby teams that compare with the biggest club sides anywhere; within living memory the wrestlers of Cumberland, farm boys and Saturday afternoon amateurs, could send out a team to meet the best in the world and beat them.

There was no Rugby in the sixteenth century, but there was “football”, the father of Rugby, Soccer, and the American game. In its primitive form it lingers today in places like Jedburgh and Workington, where most of the young male population is supposed to take part, and the playing area covers the whole town. The old Borderers loved their football, and on the Scottish side even the nobility joined in, despite the laws against “futbawis, gouff, or uthir sic unprofitable sportis”. Mary Queen of Scots once watched a two-hour match on the meadow beneath Carlisle Castle, and Francis, Earl Bothwell, the notorious “King Devil”, played the game on the Esk with other “declairit traitours to his Majesty” in 1592. He occasionally played dirty too, if we can accept Robert Bowes’ account of an earlier match in which “some quarrel happened betwixt Bothwell and the Master of Marishal upon a stroke given at football on Bothwell’s leg by the Master, after that the Master had received a sore fall by Bothwell.” Every football fan will recognise this sequence of events; obviously some things about the game have not changed. Following the incident Bothwell and the Master agreed to meet secretly next day to fight the matter out, and the king had to intervene.

Football incidents were not always so trivial, however. One match, the fore-runner of the Scotland v. England internationals, perhaps, resulted in slaughter. It happened in 1599, when six Armstrongs came to Bewcastle to play a match against six of the local English boys, and after the game there was “drynkyng hard at Bewcastle house”. However, it happened that a Mr William Ridley, an Englishman, “knowing the continual haunt and receipt the great thieves and arch murderers of Scotland, had with the captain of Bewcastle”, determined to capture the Armstrong footballers while they were on English ground. No sportsman, he assembled his friends and lay in wait, but somehow the Armstrongs had been tipped off, and Mr Ridley’s ambush party found themselves suddenly set on by more than 200 riders. Ridley and two of his friends were killed, thirty taken prisoner, “and many sore hurt, expecially John Whytfeild whose bowells came out, but are sowed up againe”.

The result of the game is not recorded.

Even more popular was horse-racing, in which the Borderers excelled, especially in the West Marches. The prizes were usually bells, and the oldest, dating from the 1590s, is in Tullie House Museum, Carlisle. Like the football matches, race meetings were frowned on by the authorities because they attracted the dregs of society, and were commonly used as covers by plotters: the rescue of Kinmont Willie was planned, in its later stages, at a Scottish race meeting, and the murder of Sir John Carmichael, a Scottish Warden, by Armstrongs, was plotted at a football match.

However, Wardens and officers sometimes attended the races. Young Buccleuch was a race addict, Lord Willoughby¹ entered horses at Scottish meetings and won a bell, and young Scrope, who was a compulsive gambler, attended at least one meet where he conducted secret political business. The meetings appear to have been quietly run, considering the times, but there were occasional outbursts of violence, and at one meeting where a Graham and an Irvine quarrelled, the Irvine’s horse was killed.

Racehorses were greatly prized, and although horse-trading between the realms was forbidden from time to time, leading Borderers as well as lesser men were willing to wink at the law where a good mount was concerned. It was not unknown even for a Warden officer to enter a horse for a race so that a prominent reiver from the other country might judge it with a view to buying—and this a reiver whom the officer had arrested in dramatic circumstances not long before (see p. 120, note 5).

Hawking, hunting and fishing were of course popular sports, and occasionally provided the excuse for Anglo-Scottish fraternisation, although one celebrated hunting resulted in bloodshed, and almost full-scale battle. Farther down the sporting scale cock-fighting was popular, and still takes place in Cumberland: during the war I saw a main organised by Border Regiment soldiers in Burma, and only a few years ago a Cumberland farmer ran for Parliament on a platform to legalise cock-fighting.²

All these sports lent themselves to gambling, which seems to have been quite heavy, and cards was also a popular way of losing money and stolen goods. Reivers commonly wagered their spoils; for example, William Taylor of Hethersgill, an Englishman who rode forays with the Armstrongs, “had fower nowte (cattle) about his house, stolen from Chalke, and plaied one of them away at cards”. At the other end of the social scale King James IV of Scotland, visiting Dumfries in 1504, played cards against the English Warden, Lord Dacre, who took him for £2 6s 8d. Border papers and letters contain many references to cards, but dice is less frequently mentioned.

The more sophisticated entertainments were rare. London might be enjoying a theatrical boom late in Elizabeth’s reign, but when a troupe of actors crossed the Border in 1599 it was such a phenomenon that John Carey wrote to Cecil about it: the Kirk had forbidden them to appear in Scotland, he reported, “and have preached against them with very vehement reprehensions”. But to the great offence of the Church, King James VI, who was a theatre enthusiast, commanded that the players should perform and that no one should be prevented from seeing them.

But such entertainments, if they had ever reached the Borderland, would have seemed tame to people whose pastime it was to fashion their drama from their own lives. “They take great pleasure in their own music”, wrote Leslie, “and in their rhythmical songs, which they compose upon the exploits of their own ancestors.” When James IV came to the Borders, with a large following of minstrels and musicians, he also spent sums on local performers, who included a girl from Carlisle specially engaged to sing for him. Her fee was 28s. But although they might hold their own in music, it was in poetry that the Borderers excelled.

The Border ballads are world famous. They are earth poetry. That they have survived in such quantity is due largely to the industry and enthusiasm of Sir Walter Scott, who saved them from oblivion. He and others added ballads of their own, but both the original folk-poems and the imitations are in a literary class by themselves. It seems strange that such a crude, warlike folk should produce such a vital and lasting literature. Scott believed that the wilder the society the more violent the impulse received from poetry and music; the impulse in the Border was both violent and permanent.

They made their poems about their robber heroes, and as a result their characteristics are turbulence and melancholy. How much Scott amended and edited the oral traditions we shall never know exactly; he was never one to spoil a good thing for the want of a little adjustment. But the raw material was magnificent; listen to the opening lines of “Jock o’ the Side”, with its stark urgency and echo of hoofs on the tops:

Now Liddesdale has ridden a raid

But I wat they had better hae stayed at hame,

For Michael of Winfield he is dead

And Jock o’ the Side is prisoner ta’en.

And compare the quiet, ominous words of the English reiver, Hobbie Noble,³ planning his last foray:

“But will ye stay till the day go down

Until the night come o’er the ground,

And I’ll be a guide worth any twa

That may in Liddesdale be found.”

But word is gane to the land sergeant,

In Askerton where that he lay—

“The deer that ye hae hunted sae lang

Is seen into the Waste this day.”

Or the saddest of all Border songs, “The Lament of the Border Widow”, supposedly written of a reiver hanged at his own door in 1529:

But think na ye my heart was sair

When I laid the mould on his yellow hair?

O think na ye my heart was wae

When I turned about, away to gae?

No living man I’ll love again,

Since that my lovely knight is slain,

With ae lock of his yellow hair

I’ll chain my heart for evermair.

These are fragments; to read through Scott’s “Minstrelsy” is to go into a new world whose echoes have sounded through the poetry and folk music of the English-speaking peoples.⁴ For those who can take the ballads—and not everyone can—they provide a haunting impression of the Border spirit, captive and restless in a hostile world, sometimes breaking free in exhilarating imagination, but always returning to the resigned sadness of the North.

This, then, was the background and culture of the Anglo-Scottish frontier society of the sixteenth century. We have seen how it arose, what influences shaped it, and how it had come to prey on itself for existence. The essence of the story is how the preying was done, who did it, and how authority tried to stop it.

1. Peregrine Bertie, 11th Lord Willoughby d’Eresby (1535–1601), Warden of the English East March and Governor of Berwick from 1598 till his death, is commemorated in the old ballad as

“… the brave Lord Willoughby, who is both fierce and fell,

He will not give one inch of ground for all the devils in hell.”

A renowned military leader and splendid swordsman, Willoughby was slightly less of an aristocrat than his name and tide suggest. He was the legitimate son of Baroness Willoughby and her gentleman-usher (whose father had been master-mason of Winchester Cathedral) and “could not brook the obsequiousness and assiduity of the court” hi his own words, Willoughby was “none of the reptilia”.

2. He was not elected, but attracted some enthusiastic supporters, who greeted his platform appearances with cries of “Git the spurs oot and let’s git crackin’”.

3. Hobbie (Halbert) Noble figures in two of the best-known Border ballads. In one he is a rescuer of Jock of the Side from Newcastle prison; the second ballad describes Hobbie’s own betrayal by one Simon Armstrong of the Mains to the English authorities. According to both ballads he was a Bewcastle man, outlawed for his crimes, and living with the Liddesdale Armstrongs. In fact there was a “Hobbe Noble” living in Bewcastle with others of his own surname and with the English Nixons in 1583 (Musgrave’s list); he may be the famous reiver of the ballads, since he was contemporary with Jock Armstrong of the Side, and with several Simon Armstrongs. But there is no record of his being outlawed, or going to Scotland, although it is interesting to note that the Nobles, English in 1583, were being referred to by 1596 as “leige subjects of Scotland”.

4. Among the modern poets who were touched by the spirit of the Border ballads, Kipling is foremost. And possibly a poetic gift may be inherited across the centuries—it is at least interesting that one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century was an Eliot.