Blood on the Border and the Making of the Anglo-Scottish Frontier

Blood on the Border and the Making of the Anglo-Scottish Frontier

For three centuries, the Anglo-Scottish border was the most violent and ungovernable strip of ground in Britain. Patrolled by armoured riders who burned settlements, stole livestock, and killed without ceremony, the borderlands operated as a parallel civilisation, one that two sovereign crowns could neither control nor afford to abandon. The reivers, as they were known, were not mere criminals. They were the rational product of a frontier that had been organised, across generations of warfare and institutional failure, to reward exactly the kind of organised predation they practised.
Blood and Border traces the full arc of this extraordinary world, from Hadrian's decision to draw a line across the landscape of Roman Britain to the systematic pacification that finally dismantled reiver culture in the years after the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. Along the way it examines the great marcher dynasties, the Douglases, the Kers of Cessford, the Scotts of Buccleuch, and the formal legal architecture of the Leges Marchiarum, the bilateral court system that was supposed to govern the frontier and instead became one of its most reliable instruments of injustice.
At the centre of the book's final act stands an unlikely partnership: an English deputy warden who executed a notorious Scottish raider, and the Scottish warden who had guaranteed that raider's safety. What happened between Robert Carey and Robert Ker of Cessford in the aftermath of that execution, the crisis, the assassination attempt, the custody arrangement, and the friendship it produced, is the most human story the border ever generated, and the closest it ever came to governing itself.

Ricardo Long-Grimes grew up in County Sligo and spent his formative years fascinated by the places where power runs out - the margins where states claim authority they cannot enforce and communities build their own rules in the gap. A historian of the early modern British world, he has spent many years researching the Anglo-Scottish border and its extraordinary reiver culture, travelling the drove roads and fell country of Northumberland and Roxburghshire to understand the landscape that made the march period possible. Blood and Border is his most ambitious work to date, drawing on the full sweep of the documentary record to tell the complete story of the border from Hadrian's Wall to the pacification of 1603. He is the author of several books on British and Irish history.