THE BORDER LAW. LEGES MARCHIARUM, to wit, the Laws of the Marches; so statesmen and lawyers named the codes which said, though oft in vain, how English and Scots Marchmen should comport themselves, and how each kingdom should guard against the other's deadly, unrelenting enmity. I pro pose to outline these laws, and the officials by whom and courts wherein they were en forced. But first a word as to country and people. From Berwick to the Solway — the extreme points of the dividing line between North and South Britain — is but seventy miles in a crow's flight; but trace its windings and you measure one hundred and ten. Over more than half this space the division is arbitrary. It happened where the opposing forces balanced. The Scot pushed his way a little farther south here, and there was pushed back a little further north; and commissioners and treaties indelibly marked the spots. The conflict lasted over three centuries, and must obviously be fiercest on the line where the kingdoms met. And if it stiffened, yet warped, the Scots character at large, and prevented the growth of com merce and tilth and comfort in Scotland proper, what must have been its effect on the Scottish borders, ever in the hottest of the furnace? The weaker, poorer, smaller kingdom felt the struggle far more than Eng land, yet the English were worse troubled than the Scots; being the richer, they were the more liable to incursion; their dalesmen were not greatly different from other Eng lishmen; they were held in hand by a strong central authority; they had thriving towns and a certain standard of wealth and comfort. Now, the Scots clansmen de veloped unchecked; so it is mainly from them that we take our ideas of border life. The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft rounded hills and streams in
numerable, and secluded valleys where the ruins of old peels or feudal castles denote a troubled past. That past, however, is writ ten nobly over letters, for the Border ballads are of the finest of the wheat. They pre serve, as only literature can, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and beliefs of other days and vanished lives. They are voices from the darkness; but : — "He had himself laid hand on sword He who this rime did write!" The most of them have no certain time or place. Even the traditional stories keep but little to make things clear. Yet they tell us more, and tell it better, than the annalist ever dreamed. We know who and what these men really were : a strong, resolute race, passion ate and proud, rough and cruel, living by open robbery, yet capable of deathless de votion, faithful to their word, hating all cowards and traitors to the death; not without a certain respect and admiration for their likes across the line, fond of jest and song, equal on occasions to a certain rude eloquence, and, before all, the most turbulent and troublesome. The Scots Bor derers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen, and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the Highlands to the north, and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder at the burden it had to endure. For a race, what ever its good qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliotts, were girded at as " always riding"; and they were not particular as to whom they rode against. Nay, both gov ernments suspected the Borderers of an in explicable tenderness for their neighbors. When they took part in a larger expedition, they would attack each other with a suspi cious lack of heart. At best they were apt
