BOOK: Alistair Moffat, "The Reivers"

Alistair Moffat: The Reivers: The Story of the Border Reivers. New Edition. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2017. (First ed.: 2007.) 9781780274454. xiii + 334 pp.

In the late middle ages and early modern period, when England and Scotland were still two separate kingdoms with separate monarchs, the area along the border between these two countries was somewhat wild and chaotic, and its inhabitants, it seems, spent their time largely in organizing raids into each other's territory, stealing cattle* and everything else that wasn't nailed down. But this curious ‘criminal society’ (as Moffat often calls it in the present book) inspired a remarkable side-product: ballads.

[*I always guessed that reivers must be somehow related to robbers, and judging by the etymologies in the Wiktionary it is true; reive (or reave) and rob are both from the same Germanic root, but rob made a detour by being borrowed into French on the way.]

This is how I first encountered the Borders as a phenomenon, many years ago; I read the Oxford Book of Ballads and noticed how many have something to do with the border between England and Scotland. Border ballads are among my favourite kinds of poetry; they have a sort of telegraphic terseness to them, they are sparing with details, they move the story along quickly and in few words, they have a quick and lively rhyme, they often have violent or supernatural elements, emotional turmoil, great melodrama, and for some reason I find the northern dialects in which they are written very charming. I still hope to eventually get around to reading some of the other well-known collections of ballads: Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and of course Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Moffat's book, The Reivers, is a wonderful overview of the society that gave rise to these ballads, showing what it was like, why it emerged and how it came to an end. It was an almost tribalistic society, and people's main object of allegiance was not their kingdom or their region but a social group that Moffat calls the “surname”. Such people did indeed share a surname (he includes a list of reiver surnames on pp. 307–9) and were, or at least believed they were, related by common descent (p. 11). The surname had a sort of leader, the heidsman, and when he told people to saddle up and join him for a raid they did not in the least hesitate to do so. One is tempted to compare this to a clan (p. 18), but Moffat also emphasizes that there were some notable differences between the Border surnames and the Highland clans, most notably in the fact that the latter identified with an area rather than with a name (p. 162).

Thus, although this was happening in the border area between Scotland and England, much of the reiving had little to do with the conflict between these two countries, but was inspired by simple greed or by the endless feuds and vendettas between the various surnames (pp. 29–31). Many aspects of life in the Borders were adaptations to the constant instability; local magnates built fortified “peel towers” to protect themselves, their servants and animals from attack (p. 63), while less wealthy people built “bastle houses”, fortified farmhouses which they hoped would be strong enough to discourage at least the less determined would-be plunderers (p. 70).

The overview of the Borders society and lifestyle, which covers approximately the first one-third of the book, was interesting, but what I really liked was the history of the Borders, which covers most of the rest of the volume. Before reading this book, I vaguely imagined that the Borders were always this chaotic and lawless, that it was something of a natural state that must extend back into the dim mists of prehistory. But as I learnt here, this is far from the case. The Borders as we know them from the ballads are largely a 16th-century phenomenon, with a history going back another one or two centuries. Prior to that, the area was not nearly so rough; it had a higher population (p. 44), the economy was better developed, with more cultivation of fields than later, and it was also a major exporter of wool to Flanders and Italy (p. 107). How then did it become the rough and wild place we see in the ballads?

One of the factors was climate change (p. 47); the Little Ice Age forced farmers to abandon some of their fields, especially in the upland areas; this contributed to a reduction of the population and increased the importance of animal husbandry (and I guess you can't develop a culture built around cattle-rustling until there's enough cattle to rustle :)).

But most of the reasons seem to have been political; lack of heirs on the Scottish throne, or long periods of regency during the minority of an heir, led to struggles for power and hence to instability. Decades of non-stop warfare in the early 14th century tore the Borders society apart (pp. 101–2), shattered its economy (pp. 107, 130), got the local bigwigs accustomed to acting on their own and ignoring any higher authority (p. 109), and led to the emergence of a “pattern of raid and retaliation” (p. 114); raiding became “a habit of mind” (p. 125). The great abbeys and monasteries of the area were destroyed or taken over by local bandits (p. 153). Plague epidemics didn't exactly improve matters either (p. 111). The Border society entered a “vicious downward spiral”: as it “descended into organised criminality, it became progressively poorer. And its governing dynamic turned from production to larceny” (p. 129).

Occasionally, Border raids were more than just a manifestation of local criminality; large raids might be encouraged by one or the other kingdom and functioned as a part of an “undeclared war” between them (p. 173).

This glorious sentence from p. 152 is a good illustration of the instability of the times: “The outbreak of peace did not last.” :)))

In the 16th century, France and England vied for influence over Scotland (pp. 196–7, 220); Henry VIII organized outright invasions of Scotland that were infamously destructive (pp. 179, 184, 191), and he paid pensions to notables on the Scottish side of the border to get them under his influence (p. 185); religion was also a cause of conflict, as many of the Borderers held on to catholicism for a longer time than the rest of Britain (p. 176).

In the wake of all this came the most intense period of raiding, covering the second half of the 16th century; apart from the reasons mentioned above — climate change and political instability — raiding may have been encouraged by the awareness, among the heidsmen of the Borders, that the times for raiding might soon come to an end: Elizabeth, the queen of England, had no heir and after her death, James VI of Scotland would inherit the English throne, and once both kingdoms were ruled by the same person there would be no obstacle to suppressing raiding and restoring peace in the Borders (pp. 204, 270). Some of the best-known ballads refer to raids and events that happened during this period, e.g. Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead (p. 241) and the rescue of Kinmont Willie (p. 267).

The world of the reivers came to a fairly abrupt end in the early 17th century, when James VI also became James I of England and brutally suppressed raiding in just a few years (pp. 274–6), with mass executions and legal changes such as the restrictions on the carrying of weapons or possession of good horses (p. 276). Some of the more politically astute Border heidsmen “lined up on the side of law and order” in good time and were rewarded with titles and estates, while those who persisted in their raiding ways were crushed (p. 276). Among these latter, Moffat particularly mentions the Armstrongs, but is happy to point out that at least one of them got to go to the moon :) (pp. 154, 277).

Moffat concludes with some interesting remarks on later attitudes to the Borderers (p. 277). Authors and ballad collectors like Walter Scott often romanticised them (p. 78), but Moffat does not in the least deny, here and elsewhere throughout the book, that they were brutal criminals (at one point he compares them to Chicago gangsters; p. 144); and yet it seems clear that he, like many of us, can't help admiring their “dash and bravery” and “their disregard for central authority” (p. 277). In this I am happy to agree with him. This is yet another manifestation of the old conflict between the boredom of civilization and rule of law on one hand, and the thrill of freedom and anarchy on the other. We always end up choosing the former, but hate ourselves for it (as we well should), as I wrote on the pages of this blog before.

Sure, the world of the reivers would be a horrible one to live in, but at least they had blood flowing through their veins, and not water like most of us do nowadays (myself very much included). The best and greatest justification for their anarchic society is that it gave rise to the Border ballads. (“If we have died only that a poem is made, then we have died for a better thing than ever we lived for”, as Aneirin says in Men Went to Cattraeth). What sort of literature did orderly civilization produce in Britain in the same period? Shakespeare and Spenser, you might say. Well, I could never quite get into Shakespeare, and as for Spenser, I liked him a great deal, but if I had to choose between him and the Border ballads, I would certainly choose the latter. If you want to read epic poems of chivalry, you can always get Italian ones [1, 2, 3] in translation — but where else would you get anything like the Border ballads?

Moffat's book ends with an interesting appendix with a selection of five Border ballads, but these were hardly among my favourite ones. It looks as if they were chosen for their documentary value, they mostly report about real battles and raids, are a bit short on emotional drama and quite devoid of the supernatural element.

This was a really interesting book, a delight to read, richly seasoned with curious factoids and asides, and it's a great introduction to Borders society and history for someone who, like me, has previously only known about the Borders through their ballads.

ToRead:

• Andrew Greig: Fair Helen. A novel inspired by the ballad of the same name; mentioned here on p. 77.