The Border Reivers and the Great Curse

These were the feuding families of the border country which was sometimes England, sometimes Scotland, as the border moved back and forth.  They were known as Border Riders, Border Reivers, Steel Bonnets or even Border Names.  Reiving was essentially robbing.  Blackmayle (the origin of the word we know today) was an early form of protection racket.  Greenmayle was the official rent that farmers paid to the landowner; Blackmayle was paid to powerful Reivers, by night.



The Border Reivers*


It started with Edward, Hammer of the Scots,
a time of unprecedented misery and fears.
Though peace, on the whole, lies between us today
warring continued for three hundred years.

In this land, my father's land, place of quiet hills:
Liddesdale, Redesdale, Tynedale and around
lawless behaviour became a way of life;
when people are powerless, blood-feuds abound.

Wallace and Bruce fought the English overlords
but soldiers of any sort care little for the weak.
Demanding provisions, destroying what they left,
they made humble peasant lives harrowing and bleak.

Hounded and brutalised by armies on the march,
people of the border lands, English or Scot,
survived by whatever means, raiding back and forth,
moss troopers, freebooters, reivers, the lot.

With broadswords and lances the Steel Bonnets rode,
living on the plunder and blackmayle received.
Ferocity made famous in poetry and song;
most knew well what it meant to be reived.

Cruel coarse savages, as some folk would say,
the reivers nonetheless were sensitive too;
ballad writers, poets, with music in their blood,
resilient, resolute, resourceful and true.

The riders were mobile in the summer months,
leaving their homelands to live on the hoof;
dwellings were makeshift: stones, clay, and sods;
thatching or turf overhead as a roof.

The horses that carried them were bog trotters, nags;
fell ponies, strong and stout, with long mane and tail.
With unshod feathered feet they quickly covered ground;
docile, kindly beasts, never known to fail.

Not only the poorest were rustlers and thieves;
wardens and noblemen fostered the fights.
From Lammas to Candlemas, when harvests were in,
villainy was covered by the long winter nights.

A thorn in the sides of the English for years
were Armstrongs of Liddesdale, a clan of lowland Scots,
respected and powerful - mobsters sublime.
Bells were another, and Hedleys, and Potts.

Tracing my family has brought me to this:
a faint understanding of life in the past.
While some died underground, brief lives and grim,
four lines were reivers.  How the die is cast.


© 2006
Also known as Border Riders, or Names. 

The Great Curse. 

In fifteen hundred and twenty four
that prelate of believers,
the Bishop of Glasgow, proclaimed a curse
upon the Border Reivers.

The curse was long and itemized;
the man was quite a ranter.
Nothing in it could ever be said
to be nothing more than banter.

From head to toe, within, without,
from skin down to the bone
and just in case they might forget
the curse was writ in stone.

These men, their wives and children too,
their serving-folk as well,
their livestock, everything they owned,
were all consigned to hell

until such time as they repent
and this great curse be lifted.
I know not if they ever did;
how much things might have drifted.

My ancestors were such as these,
my father's and my mother's.
Roundly and soundly cursed were they
along with many others.

I know for sure my family
have known much tribulation.
Due to a curse? Can it be
we've suffered from damnation?

Recently the Scottish church
has called for exorcism:
a blessing to replace the curse
which led to so much schism.

©  2010


The curse can be seen in modern translation here:
http://web.mac.com/jamesdwithrow/iWeb/Site/Blog/DC5B0726-B97F-4F75-B786-B21D4A1D56BA.html

And in it's original form here:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sctbew/History/cursing.htm