Border warfare c.1500-c.1600
The Border Landscape and Its People
The Anglo-Scottish border in the sixteenth century was not a fixed, clearly patrolled line but a lawless zone of upland moorland, shifting loyalties and endemic raiding. Border Reivers were the principal actors: families — Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams, Nixons, Scotts — who raided across the border for cattle, sheep and ransomable prisoners with little distinction between English and Scottish victims. Reiver raids could strike at any time; a whole community’s livestock might vanish overnight. The practice was so embedded that it left its own word behind: “blackmail”, which first meant the protection money paid to reivers.
The borderlands were administered in three zones on each side: the West March, Middle March and East March. Each was governed by a Warden of the Marches, a powerful noble appointed by the Crown. Wardens held March Days — formal meetings at the border where disputes were settled and stolen goods returned. The system was supposed to provide order, but wardens were often themselves reiver clan members or in alliance with reiver families, making impartial enforcement difficult.
Border Reivers were raiding families from both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. Wardens of the Marches were royal officials meant to enforce order, but their effectiveness was limited by their own connections to reiver families.
Warfare on the Borders: Flodden to Pinkie
Alongside the persistent low-level violence of reiving, the border region was also the site of pitched battles between English and Scottish armies. At Flodden in 1513, an English army under the Earl of Surrey defeated and killed James IV of Scotland and much of the Scottish nobility. Flodden was a catastrophe for Scotland — the king and thousands of men dead in a single afternoon — but it did not end the border problem. Scottish raiding continued, and English armies mounted periodic punitive invasions known as “rough wooings” in the 1540s, intended to force a marriage alliance between the young Mary Queen of Scots and the future Edward VI.
The Battle of Pinkie (1547) was one of the last major Anglo-Scottish engagements before the Union of Crowns. English forces defeated the Scots at Musselburgh in one of the first modern battles to combine massed infantry fire from handguns with cavalry and artillery. But military victory did not translate into political settlement. The Scots sought and received French support, and Mary was sent to France, frustrating English plans for a union by marriage. The border remained a zone of intermittent conflict throughout the mid-Tudor period.
For ordinary people in the border counties, warfare was a lived reality rather than a distant policy concern. Farms were attacked repeatedly; livestock — the main form of wealth in an upland pastoral economy — was the principal target. Communities built peel towers as refuges against raids. Wealthy families might negotiate arrangements with reiver clans, paying protection money (blackmail) rather than face repeated attack.
The violence was not simply chaotic. Reiving operated according to unwritten codes: taking goods was acceptable, killing without reason was not; ransoms were standard practice. The border community had developed its own semi-legal customs because the formal legal systems of England and Scotland were too distant and too slow to provide justice. This parallel informal legal culture was one reason the borderlands were so resistant to royal control throughout the sixteenth century.
The Union of Crowns and the End of Border Warfare
The Union of Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, changed the border’s status fundamentally. What had been a frontier between two kingdoms became an internal region of a single Crown. James declared the border counties a “Middle Shires” and set about eliminating reiving through a sustained campaign of force. A joint Anglo-Scottish commission was established; reiver families faced hanging, transportation and the breaking up of their clans.
The Armstrongs and the Grahams, two of the most powerful reiver families, were targeted hardest. Many Armstrongs were hanged, and hundreds of Grahams were shipped to Ireland in 1606. By 1610, the pacification of the borders was largely complete. The border region, which had sustained a distinctive culture of violence and semi-independence for centuries, was integrated into the wider political and legal order of Britain within a decade of the union. The speed of this change illustrates how the border had been sustained as a lawless zone largely by the existence of two competing state authorities — remove the frontier and the reivers had nowhere left to operate.
The Anglo-Scottish border was never simply a local problem — it was part of the wider strategic competition between England, Scotland and France. Scotland’s alliance with France (the “Auld Alliance”) meant that a hostile Scotland represented a second front against England whenever England was at war with France. Henry VIII’s invasion of France in 1513, for example, was answered by a Scottish invasion that ended at Flodden. Securing the northern border was therefore an ongoing strategic priority for Tudor governments.
The Rough Wooing policy of the 1540s — trying to force Scotland into a Protestant union with England through military pressure — failed diplomatically but contributed to a gradual shift in Scottish elite opinion towards England in the later sixteenth century. Protestant reformers in Scotland looked to England for support against French Catholic influence. Elizabeth’s tacit support for Scottish Protestants in 1559–60 helped install a Protestant regime in Edinburgh — making the eventual Union of Crowns possible.
The Union of Crowns (1603) ended border reiving by removing the frontier that had sustained it. James VI/I declared the borderlands ‘Middle Shires’ and used a joint Anglo-Scottish commission to execute, imprison and transport reiver families. The Armstrongs and other major clans were broken within a decade.