The Debatable Land by Graham Robb

Author:Graham Robb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

21

Tarras Moss

It is impossible to know how much deeper into anarchy the Borders might have sunk if Scrope had not asked his brother-in-law, Robert Carey, to become his deputy. Despite the family connection, Carey was one of the ‘new men’ of the later Elizabethan age – men whose power was rooted in intelligence, enterprise and experience rather than inherited wealth. When Carey came to Carlisle and lodged in the castle with his wife, he was almost penniless, having contracted debts in London, but he had that rarest of qualities in Border officials: the ability to make himself liked.

Carey seems to have been the first warden to understand that killing people and torching their houses was counter-productive. Later, as warden of the English Middle March, he dealt with some persistent Scottish poachers by smashing the carts in which they hauled away the deer and then inviting them to his home: ‘I made them welcome, and gave them the best entertainment that I could . . . and so we continued good neighbours ever after.’ Amazingly, he found the reformed Buccleuch an easy man to work with, ‘the onelye man that hath runn a dyrect course with me for the mayntenaunce of justice’. He even won over the homicidal Scottish warden of the East March, Robert Kerr of Cessford, who rivalled Buccleuch in cruelty. To the surprise of Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, who put him in charge of the Middle March in 1596, Carey refused the offer of a hundred horsemen. Forty would suffice, ‘and they to be my own servants, and resident with me in my own house’. To Carey, it was a matter of pride – and professional calculation – to cost the Treasury as little as possible.

Carey’s enlightened approach to personnel management helped him to win one of the most telling victories over the reiver warlords. Though several years would pass before the Borders and the Debatable Land were free from the outlaws’ reign of terror, and though it would take the Union of the Crowns to loosen the grip of the self-serving wardens, Carey’s coordinated offensive on Tarras Moss in the summer of 1601 showed that reivers could be defeated and reduced to a manageable rabble of ‘inbred thieves’.

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The Scottish warden of the West March, Sir John Carmichael, had recently made himself unpopular by refusing to turn a blind eye to the Armstrongs’ raids. He was also unusual in working closely with his opposite number, Scrope. For the reivers, Carmichael was a man not to be trusted, precisely because he was trustworthy. On 16 June 1600, he was riding back to Langholm from Annan when he was ambushed by eighteen riders – two Englishmen and sixteen Scots, one of whom was ‘Lang Sandy’, the Armstrong whose statue now stands near the bus stop in Rowanburn. Carmichael raced away but was shot in the back and stripped of his possessions. His corpse was carted off to Lochmaben. The tale that he was killed because one of his men

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