The Candlemass Road. George Fraser MacDonald

think I have an old man’s memories that swell up with age, but you do not know, you who live in this green quiet country with its fair pleasaunces by the Cam, and the little towns and hamlets where they cry alarm if a deer is potched or a schoolboy robs an orchard. You may journey now, from York to the Kingdom of Fife, through what you have been taught to call the Middle Shires, and meet with nothing more fierce than a beggar crying for alms by the roadside. You forget, if you ever knew, that a bare five and twenty years since there were three realms in this country that we call Great Britain: there was England and Scotland – and the Borderland between. Two realms at peace, civil and quiet under their native laws, with good governance from London and Edinborough, the folk giving glad allegiance (for the most part) to royal Elizabeth and royal James – and where they joined, a land neglected and cursed, peopled by two-legged beasts who lived by robbery and feud and murder and terror, a country where reprisal followed raid by the clock, where every nightfall brought its toll of men butchered and dwellings burned and cattle reft and hostages carried away. It was spoil, spoil, spoil, from Tweed mouth to Sark; never a moment but there were thieves in the saddle, Scot against Englishman, Englishman against Scot, and both together against each and every, and no peace any way. I have gone a-horse-back one day east from Carlisle town, and seen thirty churches in ruin, and great abbeys tumbled down on the Scotch side, and the conies running through what had been fair hamlets a week before, and now all black and smoking, and bodies unburied on every hand, and women and babes wandering in the desolation.

      And this was no war. It was, they said, the custom of the country, and no help for it. The laws of England and Scotland were clean withdrawn, and only the Leges Marchiarum, of which my lord spoke, that Border law, under which a great thief might compound for the most horrid crime with a fine and interest, and assurance of good behaviour, but no other punishment – and so to the next riding and slaughter. And this in Christendom, only a score of years ago.

      When first I went there, I was told of a traveller who had inquired of the people, where the Christians dwelt, to which they made answer, “No Christians, sir, we are Elliots and Armstrongs.” I thought it a blasphemous jest, but it was true. God had forgotten the Borderland, or turned away from its wickedness in His despair.

      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.”

      It was as though the fiend had taken him at his word, for his estate of Askerton lay in the worst part of all the border, where the baddest of the thieves were wont to run their roads – for so they called their forays, raid and road being all one to them; in the same sort they called their going forth in any number a “gang”. He had broad acres, and many fat cattle, and fifteen score tenants in petty villages and farms about, all in that pretty land that lies fifteen miles or so north and east of Carlisle, where the rich champain ground runs to the foot of the fells. So close to Carlisle, the strongest hold in all the Marches, and the seat of what government there was on the English side, should have been safe enough, but it was not so. To the east lay the great Waste, the highway of the robbers, and beyond, Tynedale, a great haunt of English thieves, Charltons and Milburns and Robsons and the like, for they robbed as families, calling themselves “riding surnames”. To the west was the country of the Grahams, a barbarous nation, Scotch or English for all that any man knew, but mostly English. There too was the Debatable Land, that had been of neither country, and only lately divided between them jealously, and a great nest of outlaws. Yet to the north was worst of all, a scant ten miles away, for there on the very rim of the frontier lay the valleys of the most feared Scotch robbers, the Nixons and Armstrongs and Crosiers and Elliots, who dwelt in Liddesdale, and if there be a Hell, and it hath a mouth, then it gapes at the foot of that dark and terrible glen, and those within are devils incarnate.

      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.

      And if the meanest of his tenants was spoiled of so much as a hen, then out from Askerton’s gate would come the red steer banner, and my lord in his silver-studded jack, lance on thigh, and his grey locks streaming in the wind, and at his back fifty, aye, or a hundred riders, every man in his steel cap with sword or Jedburgh axe, and the turf of hot trod smoking on his esquire’s point. They would ride Liddesdale to Riccarton and back, to Smailholm Tower or the Rede banks, leaving red ruin behind them, and there would be widows crying in Teviotdale for their men on the Askerton gallows. And when those he had despoiled and punished cried to the Wardens to summons him to answer at the next truce day, he would give the officer who brought the bill such entertainment as would have contented an ambassador, and when he had eaten and drunk his fill Ralph Dacre would press the bill back in his hand, wrapped in a glove, and say:

      “Bid Lord Scroop at Carlisle (or Carmichael at Dumfries, or the Keepers of Liddesdale or Tynedale, as it might be) good cheer, and tell them they may foul their bill against me, and who will collect their double and sawfey?” Which is to say, the threefold penalty of restitution imposed on one found guilty of offence. “I ride against none, nor never did, that has done me no hurt. Let the Wardens keep their border – but not ’twixt Hethersgill and Triermain, for that is my charge, and mine alone.”

      And the Wardens, who had grief enough, were glad to let his bill be continued, or adjourned. They were driven lords, with not money nor equipment nor men enough to do any good in all that frontier of decay; they were content that one so rich and strong, that had the Queen’s ear, should stand as a rock of order in a sea of misrule.

      You would suppose, in such a parish, that I was seldom idle, but for the most I was occupied with my lord’s tenants, the simple folk of the estate who clung to the faith of their fathers. They were few enough, the others taking their lead in the new religion from their lord, and in his household I was forbidden to meddle.

      So for seventeen years I dwelt in Askerton Hall, doing my duty with a failing heart, for I saw nothing but the wickedness of the world about me, and knowing a dripping on my soul that wears away faith, more even than I had known in the pagan places. I was weary with the weight of evil and my more than three score years, but without the will to go elsewhere.

      Then on a summer’s day my lord took him to the races at Carlisle, where one of his troopers won the Bell on my lord’s grey, Sandeman, wherefore he was in great fettle, as they say here, and gave entertainment at the Apple Tree on the Drover’s Lane to my lords Scroop, and Willoughby of the East March, and that good man Carmichael, and others less good, such as Hutcheon Graham the brigand, and Kerr of Cessford that they called “Fyrebrande”, and the young Buccleuch who had broken open Carlisle Castle but three years before – for the strangeness of these people is how they make company together, the lord and the peasant, the Scotch thief and the English constable, men that were at handstrokes o’ Thursday drinking together on the Saturday. I have seen that Kinmont Will, the bloodiest rogue on the West border, cheek by jowl with my Lord Hunsdon, who held the English Mid-March as the Queen’s Warden, as they made wagers on Hunsdon’s son, young Robin Carey who was his father’s deputy, when he played at football on the Bitts, whether