#border reivers

A question raised by @rembrandtswife about This Post.

"Monitory" is correct here. ( @dduane uses it in this entry of the Young Wizards "Errantry Concordance".)

Both are from the same root, but while monitory / monition is a be-careful warning, as in "watch out", admonitory / admonition with its prefix ad- (to, towards) is a behave-yourself rebuke, as in "You'd better watch out."

(Links are to the on-line Merriam-Webster dictionary).

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However, when I saw the word I thought of a nugget from history which amused us both when we first encountered it and must have been pretty memorable to recall so easily, Archbishop Dunbar of Glasgow's "Great Monition of Cursing".

Oddly enough, this monition is a rebuke, so it's actually an admonition. Maybe in the 1500s there was a difference between admonishing one person and monishing the whole bunch of them, including their individual body parts, their comings and goings, their crops and beasts, their goods and chattels... (Once Dunbar got going, he didn't mess around.)

Or maybe once a furious Glaswegian archbishop had turned admonishment up to eleven so hard that the knob fell off, he got an exemption from the more pettifogging rules of grammar.

Welcome to The Fun That Is The English Language (even when the actual language in use is Scots...)

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The Great Monition is more than 1500 words of episcopal fulmination directed against the Border Reivers - lawless clans who lived along the English-Scottish Borders and ran that "Debatable Land" as they saw fit, in a manner not too dissimilar to how certain other Families ran 1920s Chicago.

This involved what I once described as "undocumented reallocation of livestock ownership by night", but also kidnapping for ransom, arson, murder, blackmail and multi-generational feuds, all the merry Romantick stuff that's entertaining to read about as long as it happened long ago and far away even (or perhaps especially) if it involves ancestors which, in this instance, it does...

Or, as I wrote about ten years back:

Is your house a smoking, blackened shell?

If it’s still intact, have you been paying to keep it that way?

Are your cattle heading for the other side of the Border?

Are all your household goods with them?

Are you expecting the ransom demand for your wife or son any day now?

Did you see one of the men who did all these things?

Congratulations, you have just Identified a Border Reiver.

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The Great Monition can be read HERE in both its original Scots and an English translation. Ignore the bit in bold, a grovelling modern prayer for forgiveness which would have made the Reivers laugh their steel bonnets off.

What's a steel bonnet? It's AKA a "burgonet", and it's one of these.

Part of the Monition was carved into The Cursing Stone, currently on display in Carlisle...

...which - stone or curse, no-one's quite sure - has since been blamed for such sundry misfortunes as fire, floods, foot-and-mouth disease and even (gasp, woe) football failures.

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People even re-enact being Reivers, with accurate costume but (probably or at least hopefully) less-accurate behaviour...

On April 13th 1596 Walter Scott of Buccleuch freed notorious reiver William Armstrong of Kinmont in a daring raid on Carlisle Castle.

Perhaps the best known of the Border reivers (outlaw raiders or rustlers), William Armstrong of Kinmont’s first recorded raid was against the Milburns of Tyndale, in August 1583, when Armstrong was probably in his forties. In 1585 he accompanied the Earl of Angus`s campaign against the Earl of Arran and pillaged Stirling. Eight years later he was in Tynedale again with 1,000 men, carrying off over 2,000 beasts and £300 in spoils.

The events of 1596 and the rescue of ‘Kinmont’ Willie Armstrong represent a daring swashbuckling adventure. The fact that Kinmont led one of the most notorious bands of cut-throats ever to roam the Debatable Land seems to be irrelevant and in the tradition of the Border ballads we are to view him as a hero. His notoriety and activities were such that the Warden of the West Marsh’s deputy, Salkeld, captured Kinmont as he returned from a Truce Day at the Dayholm of Kershope. Kinmont was taken to Carlisle.

According to Border Law it should not have happened on a Truce Day and Walter Scott of Buccleuch who became known as The Bold Buccleuch, and was keeper of Liddesdale on whose land the arrest had been made, protested to the Warden, Lord Scrope. When Scrope refused to return Kinmont, Buccleuch became concerned that Scrope was anxious to hang Kinmont on the gallows at Harraby and so assembled a motley bunch of Elliots, Scotts, Armstrongs and Grahams to effect a rescue. Oral tradition has meant that the numbers vary from 40 to 200. The weather was atrocious which made crossing the River Eden very dangerous, but it did mean that the castle watch had taken shelter. Buccleuch left a group to cover the retreat and led the raiding party himself. Popular opinion has it that they must have had support from the inside because they entered the castle quickly. Thus with the aid of a sturdy Reiver, Red Rowan, Kinmont made his escape.

As is usual with these Border legends we look to the old sources of the story tellers before reading and writing was the norm, the old songs.

In 1525, the archbishop of Glasgow, Gavin Dunbar, exasperated and angered with the antics of the Border Reiver clans, both Scots and English alike, issued a curse against them, their descendants, their clothes, their crops, their horses and anyone who'd aid them.

It is just shy over 1500 words long, and is considered by the Scottish author, George MacDonald Fraser, to make Dunabr the greatest curser of all time. And it needs to be read to be believed.

For some reason, the website says the curse was issued in 1425, not 1525.

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Spurs of Walter Scott of Harden from Scotland dated to the Late 16th Century on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh

Walter “Auld Wat” Scott was a famous Border Reiver who led raids in both Scotland and England and famously was part of the 1592 attempted kidnapping of King James VI at Falkland Palace. After which he was declared an outlaw but escaped the King’s Justice to continue his raiding.

In 1567 he was contracted to marry Mary Scott, the daughter of John Scott of Dryhope. Supplies were low at the time so she supposedly gave a gift of riding spurs on a plate implying he should go out and take from his neighbours.

Walter Scott (the poet) wrote of this event in his poem The Reiver’s Wedding:

They ate, they laugh’d, they sang and quaff’d, Till nought on board was seen, When knight and squire were bound to dine, But a spur of silver sheen,