The Steel Bonnets

I

Hadrian draws the line

In the beginning was the Wall. It runs across the neck of England from Solway to Tyne, a grey stone ghost to remind tourists of the mighty empire that once ruled the world from the Caspian to where Carlisle Cricket Club’s pavilion now stands. It is, by any standards, a tremendous monument, to the brilliant, witty Roman emperor who conceived it, to Aulus Platorius Nepos, legate, who supervised its building, and to the three legions who actually dug the complex of ditches and mounds, and raised the parapet and intervening fortresses. They were assisted by Roman sailors and auxiliary troops, and no doubt they received local help, if they called it that, in the fetching and carrying. In five years or thereabouts from 122 A.D. the great rampart, dotted with castles and garrisons, was stretched across the countryside, over meadow and moor, down into steep gullies and up over rocky outcrops, along cliff summits and fell sides, a living symbol of military strength and civil power.

“Verily I have seene the tract of it over the high pitches and steepe descents of hilles, wonderfully rising and falling”, wrote the great Elizabethan antiquarian Camden. While the Wall existed, no one in the region could forget Rome, or what Rome stood for.

The natives have never forgotten. In their time they fought and died over the Wall, gaped at it, played on it, reviled it, admired it, and removed its stones to make houses, dry-stane dykes, and sheep folds. Lately the Ministry of Public Building and Works have been working splendidly to restore it and have filled the mortar spaces with a curious green cement. But in spite of what Sir Walter Scott called “the ravages continually made upon it for fourteen centuries”, the Wall endures, and no doubt always will.

It is much more than a mere fortification; it is a dividing line between so many things. Between civilisation and barbarism, between safety and danger, between the tamed and the wild, between the settled country and the outland which was too hot to handle and not worth fighting over anyway, between “us” and “them”; we have seen, in our own time, how a wall across Berlin is a barrier of the spirit as much as of bricks and mortar. Hadrian’s Wall has lasted immeasurably longer than the Berlin wall ever will, and in its way it lives in the minds of people who have never even heard of it or seen it, or if they have, think of it only as an interesting relic which stands at an inconvenient distance from their cars and coaches.

Although any Northern Englishman can answer in five words the question: why was it built? (“To keep the Scots out”), there is still learned dispute on the point. The suggestion that it was erected to keep the inhabitants of England in has been advanced, not altogether frivolously; so far as the Wall was there for effect, it certainly operated in both directions. The layman, looking at its imposing size—it was originally about twenty feet high and ten wide, and although no part of it today is as tall as this, it is still an awe-inspiring barrier—may be excused for thinking it was a defensible castle wall on a gigantic scale. In fact, it was not intended to be a Maginot Line. As Viscount Montgomery has pointed out, it was a deterrent rather than a defence, which could never have resisted a well-organised invasion, and indeed the wild men from the north overran it and its chain of castles and platoon strongpoints on at least three occasions.

But it was not an obstacle that any raider could take lightly; even if he succeeded in crossing it, and escaping the attention of Roman sentries who were never more than half a mile away, and usually no doubt a good deal closer, he still had the problem of returning with whatever he had lifted on the southern side. The Wall was, in effect, a glorified police beat seventy miles long, manned by hard men who must have detested it. Any soldier hates cold and rain; to some of the men who garrisoned the wall, and who came from the Mediterranean lands, the raw damp and biting northern winds must have been intolerable. One can feel sorry for a cavalryman named Victor of the First Ala Asturum, who was born in North Africa and is buried at South Shields; he must have felt a long way from home. When one looks north into the bleak distance from Housesteads, and considers the kind of enemy who lived there, one can see that the Wall cannot have been a popular posting.

But whatever it did to the morale of Roman soldiers, the Wall had a lasting effect on the minds of those who lived either side of it. The regions and the people might have different names from those they bear today; the frontier might shift, as it did; the Romans might go and be forgotten; new waves of people and cultures might come to the land, but the Wall stayed, a permanent reminder of division. Long before there were Englishmen and Scotsmen, long before they had chosen their own subjects of contention and violence, long before there were Elliots or Fenwicks or Armstrongs or Ridleys, the frontier had been made, the line drawn. Undoubtedly, if the wall had been maintained at the outpost line of Forth and Clyde, or if, by some queer turn of history, the boundary had been established from Mersey to Humber, it would have happened there instead, in a different, unimaginable way. Publius Aelius Hadrianus, with the eye of a sound soldier and administrator, caused his wall to be built across the shortest distance and on the best defensible line. It was not his fault that the country on either side might have been designed for brigandage and foray; nor was it his fault that the people who came after were what they were. Land, until it is highly civilised and urbanised, gets the kind of people who are suited to it, and the country of the Wall was no exception.

By Hadrian’s work, however, the first tangible and lasting division was made. He did as much as anyone to ensure, quite unintentionally, that the people who live in Gretna speak with a different accent from those who inhabit Longtown, a few miles away. And the men who built the Wall in the rain, and defended it, and died beneath it, and begot their children to grow up beside it, and finally left it, probably looked back as it faded into the mist and thought what a waste of time it had all been. They were quite wrong.

II

The moving boundaries

After the Romans came the deluge. It was the time of the barbarians, whose frontiers moved with them. Once the Wall had been overrun, it ceased to matter for the time being, which was the best part of a thousand years. In that time the frontiers of middle Britain came and went as forgotten kingdoms were made and unmade. From the west came the Scots, into the long sea-lochs and mountains of Argyll; from the east the great tide of Angles, and the kingdom of Northumbria spread north across the Wall-line as far as the Forth; westward of it ran the land of Strathclyde of the Britons; in the highland north the Picts lived, and fought it out with the Scots until they were absorbed.

Norse and Danish rovers from the cold seas over Britain came to Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles, to the Northumbrian seaboard and Strathclyde; they were a strong strain whose names and faces endure across the Border country. And another influence arrived, but without force of arms; a turbulent, fearless Irish priest, Columba, and a Briton named Ninian brought the benefits of Christianity to Scotland, and south of the Wall the quiet Aidan and the shepherd, Cuthbert, spread the gospel in Northern England, not without controversy; before serious Anglo-Scottish political differences began, there was a north – south dispute over the manner in which priestly heads should be shaved.

Very gradually, out of the changing fortunes of races and kingdoms, a pattern began to emerge. English kings loosened the hold of the sea-rover people, and what may be seen as the prototype of an English-Scottish struggle took place when in the tenth century Athelstan of England fought a great and successful battle against a combined force of Scots, Norsemen, and Britons; the site of the battle is lost, but one theory is that it was fought by the flat-topped mountain called Birnswark, over the Solway.

England was slowly emerging as a nation, and although the name was still uncoined, Scotland was being born north of the Cheviot Hills. The line was coming back to something not far away from the boundary that Hadrian had drawn, across the narrow waist of Britain. In the eleventh century the mould was beginning to set; Scotland had her first great king, that Malcolm Canmore who in Shakespeare’s version has bored and bewildered generations of school children with his self-examination, but who in fact did kill Macbeth and established himself firmly on the Scottish throne.

Equally importantly, perhaps, he married, a princess of the English house of Alfred. She was a pious, thoroughly determined lady, and she seems to have inspired something like awe in the great rough fighting chief she married. In her influence on him, and on her adopted country, she was one of the most important women in Scottish history; through her, much that was English was imported, and remained with lasting effect on southern Scotland.

But the vital event of Malcolm’s reign took place far outside Scotland: in 1066 William of Normandy conquered England. In settling his kingdom he dealt ruthlessly with its northern areas, making a scorched desert from York to Durham, and floods of refugees poured over into Scotland; among them was the Princess Margaret who Malcolm of Scotland married. William was a thorough king, and as hardy a ruffian as Canmore himself; when Malcolm gave asylum to the refugees, and took up arms on their behalf, the Conqueror marched into Scotland in 1072, confronted Malcolm, made peace with him, and obtained his submission.

The last three words demand some explanation. Scottish kings had reached agreements with English rulers before; submission had been made, homage paid, and forms of superiority acknowledged. After Birnswark, Constantine of Scotland had become the vassal of Athelstan. But exactly what such agreements implied we cannot say; it is doubtful if the consenting parties could have said, either. Forms might be agreed publicly, but private interpretations would obviously vary. In later years, when Scottish kings were also English titled land-owners, the matter of vassalage had a real meaning, at least so far as their English possessions were concerned, and if an English king chose to understand vassalage in a wider sense, he was simply exploiting the situation to his own advantage, but without good moral ground.

Out of the historic tangle, there certainly emerged among English kings a belief that they had, traditionally, some kind of superiority over the Scottish king, and no doubt a feeling that for the sake of political security and unity—one might say almost of tidiness—it would be better if Scotland were under English control, or at best, added to England. This attitude can be charitably seen as politically realistic, or at the other extreme, as megalomaniac; it is all in the point of view.

Canmore made his submission, then, for what it was worth, but before long he was harrying in England again. In his earlier inroads he had done fearful damage, and carried off so many prisoners that “for a long time after, scarce a little house in Scotland was to be found without English slaves”, which no doubt helped the process of Anglicisation in southern Scotland. Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093.

By then the Conqueror was dead, but his energetic successor, Rufus, was an equally powerful influence in the making of the Border. It was he who had finally taken Carlisle from the Scots in 1092, settled an English colony, and rebuilt the city which had long lain in ruins, adding to it the castle which was the parent of the present fortress, and which complemented the “New Castle” which his father had built on the eastern seaboard. In addition Rufus helped Edgar, Canmore’s son, to recover the Scottish throne, which had been in dispute after Canmore’s death.

And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years. It began when, following Rufus, Henry I married Malcolm Canmore’s daughter; the close blood tie between the rulers, England’s preoccupation with the Continent, and the absence of any major Anglo-Scottish difference, all helped to keep the peace.

In this quiet time the independent state of Scotland was finally made. The three sons of Canmore and Margaret—Edgar, Alexander, and David—shaped it in the decisive half century from 1100 to 1150. They were friends of England’s, and they helped to fashion their kingdom in England’s likeness; at the same time, England was content to leave the Scots alone.

Like their mother, the three sons were godly folk, and under them the great religious houses rose and flourished, in the Borders as much as elsewhere. They saw that organised religion was a prime instrument of political stability, and used it; they also encouraged what has been called the Norman invasion of Scotland. By promoting Norman settlement, they introduced another civilising influence in the shape of the Norman gentleman-adventurer loyal to the monarch and capable of keeping order in the area he was given to rule. Gradually the feudal system was introduced into Scotland, but although Normans were settled extensively in the Border area, the new system never entirely displaced the old pattern of clanship and family chieftainship. This never died; Border, like Highland blood, was a lot thicker than charters, and the traditional tribal loyalties endured up to and beyond the union of the crowns. Its importance in the Border country cannot be over-rated.

Under the three kings there emerged a southern Scotland very like the England over the Border. The language was the same, as were the habits and customs and systems of government; the frontier was perhaps less of a barrier then than at any other time in British history. The day was dawning which later centuries were to look back on as Scotland’s golden age. For the Borderers, on either side, it was a time when they began to forget the horrors that war had once unleashed on them from beyond the line; when the peasant in Teviotdale and Berwickshire, in Tynedale or among the Cumbrian fells, could go to sleep secure.

Not that the temple of Janus was permanently closed; on three notable occasions the armies were busy across the Marches, and there was blood and fire from the Solway to the Tyne. But three wars in a century and a half, between England and Scotland when they were still in a semi-civilised condition, is not bad going; it was tranquillity itself compared with what was to come.

These outbreaks stemmed mainly from the fact that since the Scottish kings were part-English, and had considerable stakes in England—David, for example, held land in half a dozen English counties and was an English nobleman—they took an active interest in the question of the English succession. At the same time, their political duty marched with expansionist interest, and the northern English counties, to which there was at least an arguable Scottish claim, might in the process of settling the English domestic problem be secured to the Scottish side of the frontier.

Thus the Borders suffered again. In the period 1136–38 David was over the frontier, seizing Carlisle and Newcastle and devastating Northumberland, until, when he was in full cry southwards, he encountered under the shadow of the great holy standards of the saints at Northallerton, a phenomenon that was to astound and terrify all Europe. This was the English peasant with his bow; beaten by the arrow shower, David was stopped, but he still managed to retain control of the northern shires.

Forty years later another Scottish King, William, carried his new rampant lion standard south in the debate between Henry II and his sons; he failed to take Carlisle and Wark, but wasted the countryside; a truce followed, and another invasion, and this time William divided his army, like Custer, into three, the better to scour the countryside. It was a fatal mistake; the English caught him near Alnwick, and Henry II, fresh from doing penance for Becket, no doubt felt his penitence rewarded by the capture of the King of Scots. Becket’s spirit, his religious advisers assured him, had obviously been at work on England’s behalf.

William’s ransom was submission to England, of a most comprehensive kind, hostages of rank, and various Scottish strongholds, including the Border castles of Berwick, Jedburgh, and Roxburgh. However, Richard the Lionheart, when he found himself pressed for money, sold most of these advantages back to Scotland.

Much worse than either of these wars, from the Border point of view, was the outbreak of 1215, when the young Scottish king, Alexander II, became involved in the English civil war of King John and the barons. Aiding the Northern English lords, Alexander provoked a terrible retaliation from John; the Eastern Marches on both sides of the frontier were ravaged; Morpeth, Alnwick, Roxburgh, Dunbar, Haddington, and Berwick were burned, and the inhabitants of the last brutally tortured by John’s mercenaries; “the king himself disgracing majesty by setting fire, with his own hand, to the house in which he had lodged”.1

The Scottish retaliatory sweep through the English Borders was equally barbarous. As in the English inroad, churches and monasteries suffered along with the rest, and one ancient chronicler noted with satisfaction that a great number of the despoilers of one Cumbrian abbey were drowned in the Eden, weighed down with their loot.

But in the end, all that Scotland achieved was the loss forever of the Northern English counties; the Border line was finally established more than 1000 years after Hadrian, from the Solway to Berwick. It made no great difference to the Border people, who might well have been thankful that despite David and William the Lion and Henry II and John, and the petty squabbling for the English throne, the Marches had, by and large, been left reasonably peaceful during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In that time, the Border as a separate entity came into being; divided and yet united by a strange chemistry far above international politics. Half-English, half-Scottish, the Border was to remain a thing in itself; there, as nowhere else, however much they might war and hate and destroy in centuries to come, Englishmen and Scotsmen understood each other.

1. Ridpath. The Border History, p. 85.

III

England v. Scotland, 1286–1500

The golden age, of Scotland, of Anglo-Scottish harmony, and of the Border country, ended when King Alexander III of Scotland fell over a cliff in 1286. Few stumbles—if indeed His Majesty was not pushed—have been more important than that one.

Until then, as we have seen, the frontier had not been an unusually troubled place. It had suffered, but not too severely by medieval standards; the two countries had been growing up and finding their feet. The year 1286 was to see the opening of a new era. From then onward Scotland was to be of increasing importance to England. This was bound to happen as England developed as a nation state; inevitably, too, a new Anglo-Scottish relationship was born. The reasons why these things happened are simple enough, but they are fundamental to British history, and they changed the shape of the world. The new Anglo-Scottish attitudes which were assumed after 1286 have developed and been modified, but even today they bear the imprint of those decisive years in the late thirteenth century when the relationship between England and Scotland was so decisively altered.

It may not be out of place to leave the mainstream of history just for a moment, to look closer at what I have called Anglo-Scottish attitudes. In simple terms—one might call them historically colloquial—and with tremendous daring, one can try to look at the traditional English-Scottish relationship from what, one hopes, is as nearly impartial a British point of view as possible. (Practically every word of what follows will be denied, refuted, and laughed to scorn somewhere or other; I would only remark that the conclusions have been reached by a Scot born and bred in England, and accustomed to being regarded as a Scotsman south of the Border, and an Englishman north of it. Which in itself is probably significant of the attitudes on both sides).

The Scot has, and one suspects always has had, something of an inferiority complex where his big, assertive, overpowering neighbour is concerned. It is no wonder. The English race are certainly the most dynamic in history since the Romans. Within a few hundred years they turned themselves from a little nation state on an off-shore European island into the most profound influence in the world; they spread themselves, their language, their products, and above all, their ideas, over the face of the earth. There has never been anything quite like them. Admittedly, at their peak they had the Scots helping them, and only a national extremist would worry about whether the Scots’ contribution, per capita, was above or below average. The point is that the English were by far the major share of the effort; as a national powerhouse, they were in a class by themselves.