However, I was not concerned with my Lord Scrope’s problems, which I had researched and written about years earlier;9 what interested me, idly enough at first, were the questions raised by those two raids, and the possible answers. Could “Mistris Dacre” also be Scrope’s “cosen Dacre”? What kin was she to the famous Lord Thomas Dacre who eighty years before had been the terror of English and Scottish reivers alike – or to Leonard “Crookback” Dacre the arch-rebel of only twenty years before? Had the Liddesdale robbers singled her out as a specially tempting target, and if so why? Could feud be involved, or blackmail, or reprisal? Did the raid have any connection with the complex Carleton-Bell vendetta which was taking place that same springtime? If I had felt inclined to venture again into the confusion of border records I might have found the answers to these and other questions, but I doubt it. The two incidents are small knots in a great tangled web, and I knew enough of the crazy pattern of West March politics, with its criss-crossing threads of raid, feud, kinship, alliance, double-dealing, and misinformation, woven by so many untrustworthy hands, to realise that I was unlikely to succeed where my lords Burghley and Scrope had so often had to admit failure.
And there was no need to try, since what I was contemplating was not the writing of more border history, but of a fiction based firmly on border fact which might convey something that a straight history could not. In my mind was a lesson that every historical novelist learns with his first researches — that no work of history written at a distance can ever give as vivid and informative a picture as a contemporary writer, be he journalist, diarist, or novelist. (Sometimes I think the novelists do it best, and not only the giants. Surtees and Thomas Hughes catch the feel and authentic image of their time just as surely as Dickens does; no modern historian that I know has evoked the atmosphere of ’30s London as well as James Curtis and Leslie Charteris, or, for the austerity years after the war, Hadley Chase. And if I want to recapture California, I go to Raymond Chandler and Budd Schulberg.)
I was well aware that in writing border history I had failed entirely to catch the borderers in close-up. One can give the facts, the names, the explanations, but the people as they were and moved and talked and lived, is another story. Unfortunately, no Elizabethan had written it; Wardens and other reporters were concerned with official matters; when they touched on human detail, it was for a fleeting moment only. (If only Thomas Dekker had visited the border; the Reiver’s Hornbook would have been a treasure beyond price.) One writer alone had given more than a glimpse: Robin Carey, the sprightly young adventurer-courtier-lawman whose tantalisingly brief Memoirs are the nearest thing we have to a living picture of the reiver’s frontier. With him we see ambush at first hand, and play tig with the riding families in the wilderness, and lie out in the mosses, waiting, and learn how to attack a peel tower (Thomas Carleton showed him, on the spot), and through him, just once, we actually hear a reiver talking: Geordie Burn, Scotch thief of Teviotdale, reviewing his disgraceful life on the night before his hanging, with the disguised Carey taking notes.
My effort could only be a poor tenth-best, but I might come at least a little closer to catching the people and their frontier with a “contemporary fiction” than I had done with a history. It must contain nothing by way of incident, character, language, and detail that did not have warranty in the letters and reports of Wardens, envoys, travellers, churchmen, spies, and the rest, and, for what it was worth, there would be my own knowledge of the reivers’ descendants, among whom I had been born, raised, educated, married, worked, played rugby, and gone to war – for “outman, Scotsman, and forroner” or not, I too was bred of that border.
Characters and plot were suggested by the Scrope extracts: “Mistris Dacre”, the often-harried Bells her tenants, the Nixon raiders, and the absence of official protection and redress. To these I added what I knew of blackmail levied, paid, and occasionally resisted; of feud and reprisal; of the lengths to which the riding folk would go to repay debt or injury; of the “unblessed hand”; of the broken men; of the arbitrary power of lordship; of that bond which bound the land and people into something beyond the ken of elsewhere England and Scotland; of the reivers and their methods, customs, weapons, and strange code of honour; of the tortuous policy of officers like Carleton labouring, under the conflicting pressures of nationality, friendship, fear, and safety, to reconcile their interest with their duty; of the condition of the common folk who were “every man’s prey”; and of the wind and rain off the fells.
Since some of the characters I have used were real, and the rest are so well represented in the Border Papers that I can hardly call them creatures of my imagination, I should say something about them and their background.
The Dacres were once the leading family of Cumberland, but by the closing years of the sixteenth century their great days were over. They were never a “riding surname” (robber tribe) like the Armstrongs, Charltons, Elliots, Grahams, and others; their leaders were too genteel for that sort of thing, although they were always to the fore in border wars and reprisal raids. At their peak they were Wardens, sheriffs, and Governors of Carlisle, the most famous being the reckless and belligerent Lord Thomas Dacre, who was my model for old Lord Ralph; the only liberty was in shifting him from the first half of the century to the second.
Tom Dacre was a brilliant soldier and a wild man; as a youth he had risked his life by carrying off and marrying a seventeen-year-old beauty, Elizabeth Greystoke, in defiance of her guardian, Lord Clifford, and went on to win a great name as border fighter and warlord – “there is noo herdyer nor bettir knyght, but often time he doth not use the most sure order,” wrote Surrey the victor of Flodden, where Thomas Dacre led the Cumbrian riders and was the first man to reach the Scottish king, a former friend whom he had been in the habit of fleecing at cards. As Warden, Thomas held the West March against all comers, Scots and English, for sixteen years, and at an advanced age was still laying about him on foot at the battle of Jedburgh, despite “the gowte” which forced his retirement soon afterwards. Unlike my Lord Ralph (whose murder I based on that of the Scots Warden Carmichael), Thomas “the old red bull” died of a fall from his horse. He left behind him the Askerton stronghold which he had built in North Cumberland, and a memorable quotation which summed up his philosophy: “There was never so mekill myschefe, robbry, spoiling and vengeance in Scotland then there is nowe . . . which I praye our Lord God to continewe.”
His son later held the Wardenship, but was not a success, and the power of the family finally declined when their estates and title passed to the Howards through the marriage of Thomas’s grand-daughter Elizabeth. Her uncle, the rightful heir, was the “cankred, suttil traitor” Leonard Dacre, known as Crookback, a splendid villain who tried to regain the inheritance by joining and then betraying the rebellion of the “bankrupt earls” of Northumberland and Westmoreland, who hoped to release Mary Queen of Scots, then imprisoned at Tutbury in the Midlands. The revolt (during which Northumberland’s Countess fell into the hands of the Liddesdale reivers, from whom she was rescued by the Kerrs) petered out, and Leonard, who had gathered a force of three thousand English and Scottish reivers and outlaws and briefly regained two of the family’s castles, was badly beaten by Warden forces at the battle on Gelt River in 1570, from which he was the first to flee, en route to Scotland and the Continent, leaving the Dacres’ famous red bull standard in the grasp of Hunsdon, the victorious Warden.
After which, border records contain only echoes of the family’s great days, but more of raid and distress suffered, of a claim by the Lowthers on Dacre land, of Dacre tenants paying blackmail to the notorious Richie Graham, of threats from Liddesdale, of a Dacre suspected of harbouring Jesuits, and most significant of all, a letter of 1601 referring to the family’s 300-year feud with the Musgraves, which contains the phrase: “For the Dacres: if ever in theire greatness (or since) . . .”
So were the mighty fallen, and the last mention of the oncefeared war cry is in a report of
March 20, 1601, describing how Kinmont Willie and others, including “Inglish disobedientes”, apparently on a drunken spree, “brack and cutt upp the postes” of Carlisle’s north gate, “cutt upp their doores, toke prisoners &c”, and rode below the city walls roaring “Upon them, upon theym, a Daker, a Daker, a read bull, a read bull”.
It is somewhere late in that period of gradual decline that I have placed the fictional Lady Margaret,10 inspired by “Mistris Dacre” but closer, in imagination, to those noblewomen of the great Northern families who, tied by blood and birth to the frontier, often grew up in the gentler airs of the south — like old Thomas’s three grand-daughters, Anne, Mary and Elizabeth (“Bessie wi’ the braid apron”) through whom the Dacre inheritance passed by marriages with Philip Howard of Arundel and Lord William (“Bauld Willie”) Howard – there is a fine homeliness about Northern nicknames. Another vague inspiration was that lively “Lady of Gilsland”, Elizabeth Greystoke, who bewitched old Thomas into playing Lochinvar. But my Lady Margaret’s character is all her own.
The broken man who champions her may seem an unusual figure – educated reivers given to free thinking are thin on the ground in the Border Papers – but he is easily accounted for by his association with the remarkable teacher whom he calls “the gallows priest”, that rugged saint Bernard Gilpin of Tynedale (1517-83), rector of Houghton-le-Spring, whose pastoral work among the robber families of Redesdale and Tynedale can only be called heroic. Gilpin was a Westmorland man and fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, whose reforming views and condemnation of clerical abuses led to his denunciation as a heretic during Queen Mary’s reign, but a broken leg delayed his being taken south to probable martyrdom and in the meantime the Queen died, leaving the “Apostle of the North” to continue his eccentric ministry under Elizabeth.
By all accounts he was a robust and fearless preacher, but it was his hardihood, courage, and simple kindness which endeared him to the riding families on his annual winter pilgrimages into the heart of reiver country; he would give his clothes to a beggar, his horse to a distressed peasant, and the freedom of his table to all comers every Sunday; many of the boys who attended his grammar school (and some went on to make their names at the great universities) were fed and lodged at his expense. He was raided and plundered during the rising of the “bankrupt earls” – and strove manfully to save rebel riders from the gallows when the revolt was crushed. The Bishopric of Carlisle and the provostship of his old college were offered to him, but he chose to stay with his lawless charges, and when he died—ironically, the reivers’ priest was knocked down by an ox in Durham market — he left a name honoured for many generations in the borderland. From him, I choose to think, the wandered waif Archie Noble learned his Latin and much more besides.
The Waitabout character owes his surname, birth, and perhaps some of his personality to a shadowy figure of border legend who may possibly be identified with a real person in border history – Hobbie Noble, who occurs in two of the better-known ballads, one of which describes him as:
an English man,
In Bewcastle-dale was bred and born,
But his misdeeds they were sae great,
They banished him neer to return.
Some versions have him banished “to Liddisdale”, but in all versions he is an English reiver riding with the Armstrongs. In the ballad “Jock o’ the Side”, Hobbie leads the rescue of Jock from Newcastle jail; in “Hobie Noble” he guides an Armstrong raid into Cumberland, is betrayed by his leading accomplice, Sim Armstrong of the Mains, to the Land Sergeant at Askerton, who takes him captive to Carlisle, where he is offered his life if he will confess to horse-stealing, refuses, and is hanged.
The heroes and villains of border ballads are bluntly drawn, as a rule, without much finesse, but the figure of Hobbie (Halbert or Albert) Noble has some unusual characteristics: in one version he is something of a wit, and is described as smiling (which is rare in ballads); he is also a man of principle, loyal, fearless, and cool in crisis, and there is evident respect for “brave Noble” from his enemies. Child, the most scholarly of ballad authorities, finds him a gallant figure who “will always command the hearty liking of those who live too late to suffer from [his misdeeds]”.
But in stating that the ballads are all we know of this genial reiver, Child may have been mistaken. There was a “Hobbe Noble” living and reiving in Bewcastle in 1583, according to the list of “riders and ill-doers” drawn up for Burghley by Thomas Musgrave, Captain of Bewcastle. He names this “Hobbe Noble” first among twenty-three “Nobles, Taylors, some of the Grames, and a few Storyes living next to the Nixons of the Black and White Lyne rivers”, and “hard by the house [fort] of Bewcastell” where Musgrave had his own head-quarters. Bewcastle, a wasteland at the eastern end of the English West March, was a haunt of outlaws and broken men, and was constantly being crossed by raiders, especially the Scots forayers of Liddesdale which lay only five miles away. (Musgrave, although a law officer, was as great a rascal as any of his reiving neighbours but can be relied on for factual information of this kind; indeed, he is the leading authority.)
A few weeks after Musgrave’s list was drawn up, Henry Scrope, West March Warden and father of the unlucky Thomas, wrote as follows to Sir Francis Walsingham:
“Hobbe of Cumcrooke is an English outlaw resett [harboured] sometimes in both countries – for whose apprehension I shall do my diligence.”
One has to be wary of jumping to tempting conclusions, but I should be surprised if “Hobbe Noble” of the list and “Hobbe of Cumcrooke” were not one and the same. Cumcrook lies only four miles from Bewcastle Fort, close to the Black Lyne, and Musgrave notes only one other “Hobbe” in the entire area, a Nixon of no apparent importance called “Malles Hobbe”. Given that Scrope singled out “Hobbe of Cumcrooke” for special attention, and that Musgrave gives “Hobbe Noble” priority in a sizeable gang of Bewcastle villains, the assumption of common identity seems not too unreasonable; it is also interesting that the scant details given about “Hobbe of Cumcrooke” fit exactly with the Hobbie Noble of the ballads – English, outlaw, a foot in both realms. Consider, too, that those ballads contain the names of three other reivers who were living men in this generation – Jock of the Side, Sim of the Mains, and Laird’s Jock Armstrong — and there is at least circumstantial evidence for identifying the Hobbie of the ballads with both Musgrave’s Hobbe and Scrope’s Hobbe.
But whether as Bewcastle outlaw of history or as the articulate, jesting, expert frontiersman of legend, Hobbie Noble served as a model for Archie Waitabout, whom I envisaged as a reiver’s child orphaned and cast adrift after some foray, finding his way, as so many border lads did, to the care of Bernard Gilpin in nearby Tynedale, and no doubt trying that good man’s patience for several years before his wild nature took him back to the hills and mosses in young manhood. There he might well serve as a Warden trooper in the earls’ rebellion, and as a Johnstone rider in the great slaughter of the Maxwells at Dryfe Sands, shifting from one allegiance to another before becoming a footloose march wanderer and broken man on the edge of outlawry. The Nixons he fought on Lady Margaret’s behalf might be his old comrades; certainly they would be kin to those Lyne River Nixons who had been his childhood neighbours and probable relations. This was the way of the border, and the despair of Wardens and governments – that sworn friends one year could be bitter enemies the next, that feuds could run in circles (Armstrong against Robson against Elliot against Scott against Kerr against Turnbull against . . . Armstrong again), that some families were both Scottish and English, that others would change their national allegiance overnight (or, in battle, at a moment’s notice), and that in all things the borderer was a law (for want of a better word) unto himself.
One other historical figure lent something to Archie Waitabout and he was a “notorious felon at large”, Jock Graham of the Peartree. Awaiting trial for horse-theft at Carlisle, he was broken out of the city by his brother Wattie, and later, when Wattie in h
is turn was taken and due to hang at Appleby, Jock repaid the favour with some ingenuity. Wattie had been arrested by Sheriff Salkeld, so Jock kidnapped the Sheriff’s six-year-old son, and used him as a hostage for his brother’s release. Ruthlessness born of necessity, certainly, but at least it was done with some style: Jock rode alone and by day, regardless of risk, to Salkeld’s country house, found the little boy playing by the gate, and offered him an apple with the invitation: “Master, will you ride?” Little Salkeld accepted, and was spirited away – and was returned safe and sound when Wattie was set free. Jock of the Peartree’s eventual fate is uncertain; a few years later, when the authorities were sweeping the riding families from the frontier after the Union of the Crowns, he was in the Low Countries (probably serving as a mercenary, as many reivers did, upon compulsion) but returned and was arrested in London. He may have been transported to Ulster with the rest of the Grahams in the early 1600s.
Which brings me to the one entirely real major character in the story, Thomas Carleton. The Land Sergeant receives extensive coverage in border letters and reports, and I have presented him as faithfully as I can. Even allowing for the poisonous hatred that colours Thomas Scrope’s descriptions of him and his swaggering younger brother, he does seem to have been, if not a complete scoundrel, at least a most subtle, devious, and untrustworthy operator. He was also intelligent, patient, brave, and a first-class law officer when it suited him and he had no ulterior purpose to serve.