The Anglo-Scottish Border: Growth and Structure in the Middle Ages*

*1 Geoffrey W. S. Barrow The Anglo-Scottish Border: Growth and Structure in the Middle Ages* The border dividing England from Scotland runs on a roughly south west - north eastEngland alignment before thefor secondapproximately half of the110 nineteenth miles (176 century* km), 2.from It has the always head beenof the a Solway Firth - an arm of the Irish Sea - on the west to a point 3 1/2 miles north of the mouth of the River Tweed on the east. In the medieval period the border line followed the midstream line of the River Esk as it flows into the Solway Firth, and the midstream line of the River Tweed as it flows into the sea at Berwick [see Figure 1], for until 1482 the burgh and castle of Berwick upon Tweed lay in 'Berwickshire' Scotland, not England, and that fact explains why 'Berwickshire' is a Scottish, not 1 an English, county1.county . Even although Berwick was occupied and elaborately fortified by the English in the generations following 1482, it was not formally annexed to 2 England before the second half of the nineteenth century . It has always been a 'Berwickers' point of pride among its inhabitants - 'Berwickers' - that they are still in a state of war with Tsarist Russia, for although Queen Victoria's government declared war upon Russia in 1854 in the name of England, Scotland, Ireland etc. and Berwick upon Tweed, they forgot to specify Berwick when making peace by means of the Treaty of Paris in 1856. Looked at historically, the Anglo-Scottish border could be seen as an artificial creation, the product of a series of compromises between northern rulers, who failed to extend their power as far south as they would have wished, and southern rulers who despite their greater wealth and potentially bigger armies lacked the resources to subjugate and permanently occupy the northern part of the island of Britain. But the Border is not wholly artificial if by that we mean that it has no basis in the hard facts of geography and geology. Between Solway and Tyne the British island narrows to about 70 miles (112 km), a fact of which the Roman army engineers took advantage when they built first of all the Stanegate, a military way, and then in Emperor Hadrian's reign a wall, mainly of stone but partly of turf, 3 'Waistline' from Wallsend on Tyne to Bowness on Solway3.Solway . That natural 'Waistline' produces Ail works cited are published in London unless otherwise stated. 1 Nicholson, R., Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), 507; Macdougall, N., James III (Edinburgh, 1982), 154-5, 169. 2 2 Scott, J., Berwick upon Tweed (1888), 478. By the Reform Act of 1884, Berwick ceased to be a parliamentary burgh and became part of the Berwick upon Tweed division of the County of 'Liberties Northumberland. Previously the 'Liberties of Berwick', as the small district immediately around Berwick upon Tweed was known, lay in a species of limbo or no-man's land, although clearly subject to English rule. The Local Government reforms of 1974 (20 and 21 Eliz. II, c.10, schedule 1) have confirmed Berwick's status as an English borough. 3 3 Breeze, D. J. and Dobson, B., Hadrian's Wall (3rd edn. 1987). 197 198 one inevitable division between north and south. Another is provided by underlying geological features which have placed a large tract of high, barren 'the moor land and hilly country - commonly though incorrectly called 'the Cheviots' - between the Solway Firth and a point only fifteen miles up the River Tweed from 4 the North SeaSea4.. Even although those historians who have seen this as some kind of 'no political 'no man's land' are in error - for the line of the Border was always pretty clearly understood in medieval times, and even demarcated in places - nevertheless 'no the tract of inhospitable wilderness formed a geographical 'no man's land' which must often have discouraged one side or the other from sustained aggression. The existence of the Cheviot barrier, averaging around 400 m. above sea level, meant that English aggressors would find it necessary to push as far north as the Firth of Forth to fix a secure and worthwhile frontier, while Scottish aggressors, correspondingly, would wish to incorporate the northern English river systems of Eden and Tyne. For much of the medieval period it was beyond the resources of either the English or Scottish kings to hold such extended frontiers for more than a few years together. There were thus powerful considerations working in favour of the Solway-Esk-Cheviot-Tweed alignment in the formative period when the medieval kingdoms of England and Scotland were taking shape. It was of decisive significance for the location and structure of the Borders that these historic kingdoms grew out of, respectively, a southern (i.e. West Saxon) and a northern (i.e. Scoto-Pictish) kingdom. Only thus can we understand how a region which otherwise possessed a high degree of unity - Northumbria on the eastern side and 5 Cumbria on the western side - came to be divided across the middle5.middle . The unity of at least the northern half of Northumbria (what had been the ancient kingdom of Bemicia) was still recognized well into the thirteenth century before the king of Scots, by the Treaty of York of 1237, was persuaded to abandon finally his 6 ancestral claims to the four northernmost counties of England6.England . Of these, the two lying east of the Pennine watershed, Northumberland and Durham, formed essential components of Bemicia. The western pair, Cumberland and Westmorland, were equally integral parts of the ancient kingdom of Cumbria or Strathclyde. Even after Scottish royal claims upon them were abandoned in 1237 the bishops of Glasgow could still declare publicly and formally that the southern limit of their diocese was marked by the Rey or Rere Cross on Stainmore Common, the boundary dividing Westmorland from Yorkshire, thus effectively 4 Geological Map of the United Kingdom, North (Institute of Geological Sciences, 3rd edition solid, 1979). 5 "The 5 Blair, P. Hunter, "The Bemicians and their northern frontier", in: Studies in Early British History, ed. "Strathclyde Chadwick, N. (Cambridge, 1954); Kirby, D.P., "Strathclyde and Cumbria: a survey of historical development to 1092", in: Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, New Series, 62 (1962). For the general background, see Barrow, G.W.S., The "Frontier Kingdom of the Scots (1973), 139-61 and Barrow, G.W.S., "Frontier and Settlement: which influenced which? England and Scotland^ 100-1300", in: Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Bartlett, R. and Mackay, A. (Oxford, 1989), 2-21. 6 Stones, E.L.G., Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174-1328. Some Selected Documents (Oxford, 1970), 38- 53. 199 claiming that the Glasgow bishopric was coterminous with the kingdom of 7 Strathclyde7.Strathclyde . Nevertheless, even while we emphasize the fact that in securing a well-defined Border on the Solway-Esk-Cheviot-Tweed line the rulers of England and Scotland were prepared to see ancient units of kingship (to which they laid claim) cut in half, we need to make one important qualification. The English kings of the twelfth and thirteenth century were heavily committed to territorial and dynastic ambitions south of the English Channel, as dukes of Normandy, counts of Anjou, dukes of Aquitaine or Gascony etc. It would have suited their interest to preserve and consolidate the West Saxon character of their kingdom, even if this had not already been deeply entrenched in the geography of English government, the location of royal headquarters at Westminster, Windsor, Winchester, Clarendon and Gloucester, the distribution of royal demesne and of the richest sources of royal revenue. Although the kings from William Rufus (1087-1100) to Edward I took very seriously their grip upon Cumbria and Northumbria, they could not spend much time visiting these regions which were remote from the castles, hun¬ ting lodges, monasteries and rich trading towns of southern England, Normandy, Maine, the lower Loire valley, Poitou and Gascony whence their power was derived and where, one feels, their hearts really lay. The much poorer Scottish kings, by contrast, were drawn to the northern sections of Cumbria and Northumbria which the Solway-Tweed Border allowed them. Even a casual glance at the maps which scholars have constructed of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scotland would show how important in this period were the valleys of Tweed and Teviot, the (by Scottish standards) agriculturally well- favoured province of Lothian, and, further west, Clydesdale and the Ayrshire 8 plain8.plain . Here with few exceptions were the wealthiest Scottish trading towns (burghs'), Berwick upon Tweed, Roxburgh, Haddington, Edinburgh, Stirling, 9 Rutherglen, Renfrew and Ayr9.Ayr . Here also, again with relatively few exceptions, were the religious houses on which the royal house and its most favoured followers lavished their surplus wealth (chiefly in the form of land), the abbeys of Jedburgh, Kelso, Dryburgh, Melrose, Newbattle, Holyrood and Paisley, the priories of 10 Coldingham, Haddington, Manuel and Lesmahagow10.Lesmahagow . Of the numerous centres of royal government in active use in the earlier medieval period only Aberdeen, Perth and Forfar, north of the Forth, could compare in importance with Stirling, Linlithgow, Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Jedburgh, Rutherglen, Ayr and Berwick south of the Forth. The consequence of this was that the Border was of much more immediate concern to the rulers of Scotland than it was to the rulers of England. At least this was true •j •j Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. Stevenson, J. (Glasgow, Maitland Club, 1839), 65. 8 8 E.g., McNeill, P. and Nicholson, R., An Historical Atlas ofScotland, c.400-c,1600 (St.

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