The Secret History of Here by Alistair Moffat

Author:Alistair Moffat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

9 June

And this morning we have it: sun, warmth, the ground drying in a gentle breeze and the grass growing before our very eyes. Such scenes of peaceful fertility were often little more than a fond wish in the Borders five hundred years ago. I have been looking through the Protocol Books preserved by the Mason brothers and they make grim reading; inevitably there are lists of disputes, and of ruin and death in the century of warfare, and raiding that disfigured the landscape after the disaster at Flodden in 1513. But occasionally there is a smile, a flush of recognition, a document that springs off the page, one that speaks pungently of the texture of the old life in the Border countryside.

I would like to have met Gibbie Hately. He was a minor landowner and farmer who lived in a peel tower at Gattonside, near Melrose, about eight miles from here. A protection against the raiders and thieves who disfigured society for almost a century, many peel towers were built in the sixteenth century, and behind the barmekin wall around them people and stock took refuge when raiding parties struck.

Made in 1547, Gibbie’s will is distinguished by a clear sense of a life lived with relish in the first half of the sixteenth century. After reading it I felt I would recognise him leaning over a five-bar gate, looking at his lambs of a summer evening, and I would have liked him. The original document is written in wonderfully expressive Border Scots, the language Gibbie Hately spoke, and it is speckled with words and expressions long lost, so here is a translation:

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