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"WELL, old man," said one of
two long expatriated Scots to the other, with a slap on the knee and a
fervour worthy of the occasion, "we're back in bonnie Scotland at last."
The scene was a railway
carriage on the London and Edinburgh Express as it rolled slowly off the
great Berwick viaduct on to the northern shore of the Tweed. It was
unfortunate that the only other occupant of the compartment, who told me the
story, was not only an oft-times Mayor of Berwick, but one of the most
conspicuously zealous and erudite exponents of its historical past. And that
Berwick is properly jealous of its ancient dignities, its quasi-autonomy in
the first place, and, in the second, its inclusion or partnership in the
kingdom of England, with that punctiliousness, too, which is only found on
borders, is a mere truism. So in the few moments occupied in reaching
Berwick platform, there was fortunately for them only time to inform these
presumptuous Scots, with the curtness enforced by circumstances and
justified by fact, that they were not by any means in bonnie Scotland, and
would not be for some miles yet. Whether they called a porter to solve the
mystery at Berwick station, or went on their way rejoicing as careless
sceptics, matters nothing. For their only interest here is as prevalent and
not abnormal types of the British traveller. At any rate very few Southern
acquaintances of mine, I am quite sure, would have felt any call to damp the
patriotism of the Scottish exiles or been any wiser than they. Possibly a
majority of Southerners and plenty of others besides would place
Berwick-on-Tweed in Scotland, if suddenly challenged to stand and deliver
themselves on the subject. And if a vague recollection of something
geographically eccentric about Berwick comes down to them from days before
they went to a public school and forgot their elementary geography and
history, it is pretty certain that the town alone would be associated with
it. Berwick bounds may possibly flicker as a dim phrase in some
half-remembered ballad. But that the whole south-eastern corner of what by
every law of nature and common sense should be the Scottish county of
Berwickshire beyond Tweed, even to the measure of some eight square miles of
pastoral and tillage upland, is English soil, remains, I feel morally
certain, a geographical and political curiosity only understood by
Borderers. Thousands upon thousands of Southerners by rail, and nowadays by
road too, traverse this famous little "County of the borough and town of
Berwick-on-Tweed" every summer, en route for the Highlands. It would be
interesting to know how many of them hail the Tweed as they cross its waters
as the Scottish boundary, and if road travellers pass Lamberton old toll bar
without even a nod of recognition.
Berwick, I think, changed hands thirteen times;
and if England had held it continuously as a protection to her frontier for
over a century, it was a Scottish king of his own free will, in the
exuberance of high spirits natural to the occasion, who confirmed its
status. One can imagine a pawky soul like James VI., as on his journey
southward he licked his chops at the fat prospect ahead of him, being in a
mind to shower charters upon Englishmen. For Berwick, hitherto the Key of
England, had now with the Union of the Crowns become politically
inconsequent. "The Borders are no longer the Borders, but the centre of my
kingdom," exclaimed the joyful Jamie as he headed for the cakes and ale of
the south, and fired a gun with his own hand from Berwick ramparts, in
rather inauspicious augury, one might fancy, of the powder that was to be
consumed before his ill-starred progeny were to be finally got rid of.
Dull indeed must be the soul who can look across over a brimming Tweed to
the red-roofed, wall-girt town climbing the further shore to the sky-line
without a quickening pulse. Northern towns, like northern folk, only more
so, are apt to disguise their sentiment beneath a stern exterior, even when
restless modern enterprise has not besmirched them out of all recognition.
Glasgow was once the most bowery and altogether attractive town in Scotland,
and delighted the eye of the eighteenth-century foreigner fresh from the
gloomy shades and the insanitary terrors of Auld Reekie's mile-long highway.
I have never read any eulogies of pristine Newcastle, King Coal having so
early marked it for his own and befouled the streams of Tyne. But Berwick
has happily escaped all taint or smirch of such necessary abominations, and
still leads, as a place so nobly situated and of such teeming memories
should lead, the clean and simple life, dealing only in the ancient products
of land or sea. It is distressing that nearly all of the ancient castle,
which must have stood up so proudly at the highest angle of that almost
perfect circuit of enclosing wall which still haply surrounds the town,
should have been displaced by a railway station. But we may be thankful that
a generation which permitted this did not do a great deal more. It might
have laid despoiling hands on a girdle of fortification not merely unique in
Britain, but associated with a place where of all others perhaps such
reminders of a warlike age should make stirring and direct appeal to the
historic fancy. Carlisle, Chester and Shrewsbury, York and Conway, each in
their degree, have the same old tale still eloquent on their face. But
Berwick was in truth the Key of England as it was by the same token the
menace of Scotland. For look in the map, how old Northumberland here thrusts
its narrow crown into the very flanks of its ancient foe, and how Berwick,
like an outpost of an outpost, stands beyond the Rubicon!
The sunshine which illuminates so many days upon
this north-eastern coast, and that, too, with something more of radiancy and
sparkle than is common in our misty island, lights up the ancient town upon
its genial southern slope, its tile roofs, and its patches of foliage with
admirable effect. If a railway viaduct may be denied all harmony with a
walled town, it can at Ieast be imposing, and one is forced to admit that
this gigantic structure, half a mile in length, and held in mid-air by
nearly thirty arches, a hundred and forty feet high, makes no bad foreground
to a distant prospect of town and river. Maybe there is something in the
very contrast between this modern masterpiece, these elegant aerial arches
with the train like a child's toy crawling over them, striding from hilltop
to hilltop as if in utter contempt of Tweed's broad flood, and the old Tudor
bridge, squat and massive, thrusting its long procession of low arches over
the river's broad surface into the heart of the town.
The High Street of Berwick has a fitting portal
in the Scots Gate, which connects the ramparts near the top of the town. It
terminates, as if to mark the procession of history, in an imposing Town
Hall that has the half-assimilated House of Hanover—I mean the period—writ
Iarge all over it. Its dates, too, are remarkable. For the first part was
finished in 1754, not probably an annus mirabilis in the historical
curriculum of Berwickian schoolrooms, but the year when even Horace Walpole,
who did not think imperially, wrote down that a random volley fired by a
young Virginian in the backwoods of America, set the world on fire, or, in
other words, that the great struggle between England and France for North
America had begun. The year of its completion was the very one which
witnessed the extinction of that conflagration and found Great Britain
mistress of North America from the Floridas to the Pole, and of Heaven knows
how much more besides. The belfry seems to belong to an earlier date, and
the bells must have been just recast in time to ring out the capture of
Louisbourg and to take up its turn as the church steeples of Northumberland
echoed northward the greater glory of Quebec. Like the rest, too, no doubt
it varied its frenzies with solemn tolls for the dead Wolfe, who in the
preceding years, as a captain, major, or colonel of infantry, had many a
time marched through Berwick. It was a neighbour, too—Captain Douglas of the
Royal Navy—who brought the news to England, and his portrait hangs in the
home of his descendants at, Springwood Park, near Kelso. Belfries were in
truth kept busy enough in those glorious and crowded years of Chatham's war,
to say nothing of tolling out one George and ringing in another. I never
look at Berwick To Hall without a passing thought of America; not of that
gigantic modern organism of motley composition and restless enterprise and
overpowering modernity that stands for the term to-day, but the America of
Washington and Franklin, and of those old communities still representative
in their varying types of the past cleavages, civil and religious, of the
Mother Country. But there would need something more perhaps than the niere
accident of a famous birth year to justify these parenthetical phiIanderings
in Berwick High Street, and so there is. For contemporaries and repIicas
more or less of Berwick's Town Hall still here and there greet the wanderer
in the old States of America, solitary landmarks of another age when they
too rang heals on the King's birthday, and celebrated British victories in
the Mediterranean or the Spanish Main. It must be furthermore recorded that
this aspiring belfry, which commands such a breadth of classic soil and
troubled sea, has exercised a function altogether unique, I believe, among
civic buildings; for Berwick is nothing if not original in almost all that
concerns it. A
Cromwellian church, though . a rarity, if not generally a highly prized one,
may be found here and there throughout England, but I do not know of any
other church, Norman, Gothic, Cromwellian, or Georgian, whose bells are hung
in the Town Hall and ring people to their devotions as these have done for
centuries from the other end of the town. Here also still tolls the curfew,
not merely at eight in the evening, but also at five in the morning, as the,
light sleeper will discover.
The wide, sloping High Street of Berwick wears
for a northern town a really cheerful countenance, and the shops that front
it make a display worthy of a place that, if it owes little or nothing to
urban industries, takes toll from no mean territory of both nations, to say
nothing of having been addressed in Royal Proclamations as a kingdom unto
itself. It is still the common stamping-ground of the men of the Merse and
of Northumberland, but in a fashion far different from the days when no name
was bad enough for each to hurl at the other, or even in friendlier and more
recent times when the Scottish and English carters stood on different sides
of the market. It is now Northumbrian ground in every essential particular,
the powers of life and death granted or confirmed by James's charter to the
Mayor, Recorder, and Aldermen, having been abolished in 1842, seventeen
years before which they hung their last man or woman on Gallows Hill outside
the old castle. Berwick
even still boasts the largest grain market in the north. Though so much of
Northumberland has been laid away to grass, among Berwickshire farmers,
stimulated not a little by the local brewers and distillers, wheat within
the same easy memory has been largely displaced by barley. But all this
country on both sides of the Border is the domain of the agriculturist and
the grazier at their greatest and almost at their best, and of a land that
giveth of its uttermost, as any one but a Cockney could see at a glance if
he were satisfied with that, which will not be our case here. Berwickshire
lairds and their broad-acred tenants, Northumbrian squires with their yet
broader-acred ones, Scottish ministers and Anglican parsons, no longer
outwardly distinguishable from one another, all forgather in Berwick High
Street. As a matter of fact, I fancy a good deal of Berwickshire county
business is discussed informally, at any rate, in the English town which
most outsiders no doubt assume to be its capital. Hinds and bondagers in
their best apparel from the fat lands of the Merse, or even shepherds from
the southern slope of the Lammermoors or the heart of the Cheviots, or from
the nearer mid-Northumbrian heaths, may be descried on market days,
glowering with enraptured gaze at the resplendent shop fronts. But to give
point to anything further that may be said here about the Berwick of to-day,
some brief sketch of its crowded story seems quite imperative.
The long and bloody turmoil which raged for
years before and after the Norman Conquest need not detain us, for Berwick
and the river Tweed had small significance when Northumbria reached from the
Tyne to the Forth, and the mightiest rock fortress in England, upon the high
crag at Bamburgh, dominated a homogeneous Saxon people. The blood-spilling
and devastation that preceded the arrival of William the Norman and split
the Lothians and the Merse from Northumberland, was no question of race, nor
of popular movement, but a mere orgy of kings and chieftains consumed with
those passions for power or revenge which made up the main interest of their
lives. It will be enough that the Lower Tweed became the boundary between
King William's England and that heterogeneous collection of provinces and
races that gave but intermittent and uncertain allegiance to the Scottish
throne, till the prowess of Bruce and Wallace made that country, the
Highland clans excepted, into a nation, and created the patriotism that
gives the term significance. So without boggling over the prior scuffles of
Dane, Scot, or Saxon, or the blows of the Norman Conqueror, which fell
indiscriminately upon all such as were left of them, it will be quite enough
to think of the Tweed in its historic sense, with Berwick for its
watchtower, as dating from the Norman Conquest. It is better for general
purposes to charge the memory with a luminous epoch that is approximately
correct than to confuse it with intricate modifications that do not really
matter. So when the
Lower Tweed became the boundary between the kingdoms, Berwick, as was
natural, remained a Scottish town, and though occasionally captured in times
of war, no idea of attaching it to England seems to have been current. It
was held once or twice as a pledge for the good conduct of Scottish kings
who had been worsted after making themselves troublesome on English soil,
but that is another thing altogether. With a brief exception, Berwick was a
purely Scottish town till the wars of Edward I., when the real ill-humour
and hatred between England and Scotland began. Moreover, it was a
marvellously busy and prosperous place as well as the constant resort of
Scottish monarchs. Edinburgh and St. Andrews alone rivalled it in the
northern kingdom, and scarcely any seaports in England equalled its foreign
trade; for though Scottish politically it tapped the whole of the English
Borders. It was in the long and beneficent reign of King David of Scotland,
who made it one of his four royal boroughs, that Berwick attained to its
full importance, and this was in the first half of the twelfth century.
Attempts were even made to reunite Northumberland with the land between the
Treed and Forth, but these came from the Scottish, not the English kings,
and only brought defeat and disaster, notoriously so, at the hands of Henry
II., who retained Berwick Castle as the price of victory. It was sold back
to William the Lion of Scotland by Richard I., who would have sold anything
for cash to finance his crusades to the Holy Land. William, however, was
foolish enough at Richard's death to grasp again at Northumberland, which
brought down John to Berwick, when a truce was made. Alexander, William's
son, undeterred by his father's example, again flouted John, who was ill to
provoke if there was any chance of his gaining the mastery. He came this
time with a great host, vowing vengeance. Alexander made no attempt to hold
Berwick, whose citizens were barbarously treated by John's soldiers, even to
hanging them up by their fingers and toes till they disclosed the
whereabouts of their treasures. After a devastating excursion into the
Lothians, the King burned Berwick, setting fire, it is said, to the very
house that had sheltered him with his own hand When he had eaten the
district bare, and made a bonfire of anything that would burn, he retired to
look after his refractory barons in the south, and after some retaliation on
the part of the Scots and great fulminations on the part of the Pope, things
eventually quieted down. After these amenities and with the death of John
there was something like peace between the kingdoms and much good-will
between the royal houses, strengthened by marriage ties, for some seventy
years; and, indeed, the real severance between the Scottish and English
people had not yet begun. An attempt was made to define the Border line, but
this was in parts so shadowy that it was left undetermined, with the ever
famous " debatable land " in the middle and western marches. The Scottish
kings gave up all designs on Northumberland, and as regards the
indeterminate nature of the political nationality of Cumberland through this
period, we are in no way concerned with it.
But it needed something more than a fire in
those days of wooden houses, or a massacre in times when human life was of
small account, to quench the prosperity of a town that had any measure of
it, and Berwick had a great deal. So its wool trade continued to flourish,
and fleets of ships cleared from the mouth of Tweed for Flanders and for
Calais. Flemish traders settled in the town, and the present post office in
the wool market marks the site of the Red Hall, then the Exchange. The
customs revenue from the port was an immense asset to the poor kingdom of
Scotland, and was equal to one-fourth of all the customs of England, while
the wealth of its prosperous burghers must have been great for the times.
They bestowed gifts upon almost every abbey in Scotland, and they lived in
palaces, while Berwick was a second Alexandria, according to an enthusiastic
visitor at that time. No wonder the Scottish kings and queens delighted in
the hospitality of a place that must have been a prodigious contrast to the
rest of their dominions, though it seems probable that southern Scotland in
the thirteenth century enjoyed many amenities and advantages of civilisation
that were swept away for centuries by the coming cataclysm and the chronic
turbulence it created.
"Alexander our King was dede,
That Scotland led in luv and I,
Alwaye was sovs of ale and brede
Of wyne and wax of gamyn and gle,
Our gold was changed into Iede.'
Edward I. was a great warrior and statesman
beyond any doubt, but one of ruthless methods, and his shadow lay upon the
coming centuries, whether for good or evil, at any rate after a fashion
altogether foreign to his calculations. Ile had disposed of the remnants of
Welsh independence, with which his predecessors had wrought unsuccessfully
for two centuries, in one final campaign, and had taken infinite pains to
give stability to the administration of an individualistic people,
antipathetic and quite unintelligible to his own, but irrevocably destined
by geography and by numerical insignificance to the union that he completed.
It is not surprising that a man with great ideas and the ability to put them
into practice dreamed of a united Britain. Scotland, all at Ieast that stood
for it in those days, was largely peopled by men of kindred, not alien ways
and speech. His own Norman barons owned bid; slices of it, and passed as
Scotsmen when convenient. Their vassals had much more in common with the
tenantry of Durham or Northumberland than either had with the natives of
Devonshire. Edward was probably not a scientific ethnologist; he had not the
benefit of modern analysis as to the conjectural proportion of Pictish,
Irish, Scandinavian, or English strains in the blood of southern or eastern
Scotsmen. It was enough for him, and would have been enough for any
statesman of his day, that the men of all ranks to the north of the Tweed
who exchanged blows with him were mainly a variety of that English race whom
a divine Providence had called his own Norman stock to rule. IIe was
perfectly logical in his views of the peace and power and solidarity so
natural a union would confer on the island of Britain. The great barbarous
back country to the north and west might well count for nothing with him
when it counted for next to nothing politically in the kingdom of Scotland.
To the impartial modern not obsessed with the prevalent mania for reviving
sectional prejudices under miscalled headings, Edward's statesmanship was
surely sound. If it succeeded, one need waste no words on the ages of
suffering and misery it would have saved to both nations ; but it was never
brought to the test. Fate struck the tall man down too soon, and by the
irony so often attached to that sinister deity, made things far worse than
they would have been if Edward had left the whole business alone. There had
been no previous animosity between English and Scots as such, but the legacy
of wars that Edward left to less capable successors created a hatred and,
what is more, a national feeling north of the Tweed that had hitherto
scarcely existed, and was the fruits of victory. When the peaceful hopes of
Edward were frustrated by the death of the young Queen of Scots, whose
marriage with the first Prince of 'Wales was to have secured the hoped-for
union of the kingdoms, the English King contented himself for the time with
the office of arbitrator among the candidates for the Scottish crown. The
oft-adjourned ceremonies at Berwick and at Norhain higher up the Tweed,
which resulted in the selection of John Baliol, subject to an undertaking of
homage to Edward, are among the memorabilia of history.
The last of these momentous gatherings was held
in 1292 in the great hall of Berwick Castle, which covered, as already
noted, the site of the present railway station. Here were assembled the
notabilities of England and Scotland, including the power and might and
chivalry of both kingdoms, backed by crowds of commoners from both sides of
the Tweed. Few spots in England have witnessed a meeting fraught with more
far-reaching consequences to Britain than this one so inharmoniously
obscured by a bustling railway station. We all know that neither the
selection nor the manner of making it was agreeable to the haughty temper of
the Scots. No one probably knew this better than Edward, or, it might
perhaps be added, cared less. After his business-like fashion, he had spent
the whole summer and autumn in Berwick Castle, and before leaving it he
broke the old seal of Scotland into four parts and put them into a leather
bag to be placed in the English Treasury as a testimony that the kingdom was
now in vassalage. Homage, however, had by no means always the subservient
significance that the word might suggest to the casual reader. Without
elaborating this matter further, it will be enough that Edward left a very
unpleasant taste in the mouth of the Scottish nobles when he departed, while
various high-handed measures concerned with Anglo-Scottish commerce and such
like which immediately followed showed i hat he by no means intended that
his suzerainty should be merely one of lip homage. He was a man who had made
few mistakes of policy in his pregnant reign, but he couldn't leave Scotland
alone, and pressed his overlordship in various ways that a free, unconquered
country could not brook.
The right of appeal from Scottish to English
Courts was insisted on. The weak Baliol was summoned to London to justify
certain proceedings, and actually stood at the Bar of the Parliament House.
Scottish barons, too, were summoned to Edward's standard in his French war,
and it is not altogether surprising that the group of nobles which in fact
governed Scotland, now made an offensive and defensive treaty with France, a
virtual commencement of the alliance with that country which for three
centuries so harassed England. The Scots had already invaded England, so in
the spring of 1296 Edward descended upon Scotland with 30,000 foot, 4000
horse, and a fleet. He made a beginning with Berwick, which was left to the
sole defence of its garrison and unfortunate citizens. It was said that
these foolish people sent taunting messages to this all-powerful warrior,
and so helped that short and bloody work which was made of them. For eight
thousand of them were slaughtered, and the mill wheels of the town could
have been turned, says an old chronicle, by the torrents of blood. In the
Red Hall which stood in the Wool Market thirty Flemish merchants defended
themselves with great and sustained valour till they were burned alive in
the ruins. The castle was soon afterwards surrendered, but its garrison was
spared. New fortifications, which are still conspicuous, were at once
commenced, the vigorous King, now nearly sixty years of age, tradition has
it, wheeling a barrow himself. The ancient glory of Berwick sank amid the
cataclysm to rise no more. It remained a place of trade and of the first
military importance, but no longer an abode of merchant princes and the
delight of convivial monarchs.
We need not follow Edward on his victorious
march round Scotland, nor yet on his subsequent invasions, which in reducing
that distracted kingdom to submission bred within it the patriotism and
union that under Edward's weakling son shook off the foreign yoke at
Bannockburn and founded a nation. It may be mentioned that the English host
marched from Berwick to that fatal field, and that while in the possession
of Robert Bruce's people the town had to stand a determined though
unsuccessful attack at the hands of a large army under Edward II., burning
to avenge his late disaster. Soon after this Berwick witnessed the marriage
of Bruce's son to Edward's daughter, which was to end all blood-letting. But
it made little difference till, in 1328, the vassalage claim over Scotland
was formally abandoned.
Edward III., however, provoked by the renewed
turbulence in the north, began the whole business over again, and proved as
great a scourge for a time to Scotland as his grandfather had been, without
that prospect of union which had half justified his grandfather's policy.
For if the Scots were not strong enough to withstand his armies in great
shocks, they had now the memory of Bruce and Wallace to inspire them with
patriotic ardour and give them sufficient determination to make their
country impossible to coerce. Years of fruitless strife followed, though one
must always try to remember that the barons of the feudal period in both
countries existed primarily for war. Both they and no doubt a very large
number of their following thoroughly enjoyed it. Without it for any length
of time they must have been hopelessly bored, and, worse still, lost some
measure of cunning in the one art by which they held their possessions and
their status in the eyes of their peers. Their form of hunting carrying no
element of danger either in the pursuit or in the capture of their quarry,
though interesting no doubt from a hound or hawk point of view, could never
have been a substitute, but merely a gentle interlude to these sons of war.
The tourney was much more like the real thing, of course. Indeed it must
have been rather an appetiser than an alternative. Edward III. (luring a
brief truce held a famous one at Berwick, when twelve Scottish and as many
English knights were pitted against each other. From the chronicler
Wyntoun's account of it, the percentage of mortality was about that of a
severe modern battle.
But the third Edward did no outward damage to Berwick. On the contrary, he
did much work on the fortifications. He also won the great battle of Halidon
hill, just outside the town, and revenged Bannockburn in a mere military
sense. But the influence of Bannockburn lived on, while Halidon mattered
little beyond the slaughter and the personal triumph. The King, however, who
concerned himself much with the wool trade of the country, harassed that of
Berwick so constantly with vexatious burdens that any tendency towards
recovering its ancient prosperity was effectually scotched. But it remained
a great military base, and was now again English soil. This was the era of
the Percies, who succeeded one another as Governors of Berwick and Wardens
of the March. It was also in this same sense the era of the Douglases, who
became, as every schoolboy knows, their rivals to the north of Tweed. When
royal hosts were not actually upon the war-path, these two great houses'
kept things lively with their own martial exuberance, while the strife that
surged backwards and forwards within touch of I3erwvick through the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made ulp the sanguinary tale. To tabulate
the men of might who performed deeds of daring at Berwick or laid about them
in its blood-stained neighbourhood would be merely to summarise English and
Scottish history to no good purpose. For every one who was anybody was here
at one time or another till the union of the crowns, and I shall likewise
forbear any further precision as regards the thirteen separate occasions on
which the town has been handed over from one nation to the other. It will be
enough here that at the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1482 the last
transfer was made, this time to the English by the Scots, who had held it
for thirty years, and English it has ever since remained.
From the top of Berwick town, looking up the
lower reach of Tweed with a cast to the southward, you can readily mark,
some dozen miles away, the fir-crested ridge of Flodden ; its six hundred
feet or so of stature belittled rather from this point of view by the
majestic masses of the Cheviots that rise in the immediate rear. The guns of
Flodden were probably heard on Berwick ramparts, and of a surety even
Berwick, satiated as she must have been with drum and trumpet, had been then
long at ease, and may well have felt during those thirty days that the time
of the Edwards had returned. For those of the Tudors were, or should have
been, far humaner ones, and on the face of it this rousing of all Scotland
to raid England on a trifling pretext when Henry VIII. and his chief forces
were in France must always seem a flagrantly wanton business, almost,
indeed, meriting its terrible recoil. Berwick had no direct concern with
Flodden, save for despatching a few men there and receiving afterwards a
division of the victorious army bearing the body of the Scottish King.
It had not been very Iong since the town had
witnessed the effusive display and enthusiasm which accompanied the
northward journey of Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII., to marry the
ill-fated monarch. But. Berwick had a great deal to do with the ferocious
onslaughts on Scotland made by Henry- in his later days through the agency
of Lord Hertford. The King's instructions were of a ruthless kind, that
would have almost made William the Conqueror or even John blush to indite,
and in the course of two expeditions, in which Berwick was, as usual, a
base, they were in great part carried out from the Tweed to the Forth.
"Thanks be to God," reported Hertford, "there is not one peel, gentleman's
house, nor grange we have not destroyed."
After Henry's death, during the ascendancy of
Hertford, otherwise the Protector Somerset, and right on into the first
years of Elizabeth's reign, Berwick was the «•itch-dog of armed truces or
the base of active conflict between the nations. It was then, after large
sums had been spent at various times on the old fortifications, which were
constantly displaying some fresh weaknesses before the growing force of
artillery, that Queen EIizabeth, who in person or by inspiration was always
happy in bringing the best talent to the aid of public works, made Berwick
one of the finest models of defensive science in Europe. And there are the
works to-day, almost as perfect in all essentials as the engineers left
them, a spectacle unique in England, and rare anywhere. One feels tempted to
recall Berwick as lying rather within these ramparts, than to describe the
ramparts as surrounding Berwick, so great a factor are they in any survey of
the place. There is a touch of irony in the reflection that after Berwick
had been hammered through the centuries and bathed periodically in seas of
blood, no hostile shot, so far as I know, was ever fired against these
tremendous works, which were raised as much against the foreigner as against
the Scot, the traditional Franco-Scottish entente being naturally in the
mind of the builders. Completed in 1565, the next generation were to see
Scotland and England united under one crown and international conflict
cease, and with it the French danger at this point of the island. In the
days of Elizabeth and the distractions of Scotland in those of the hapless
Mary Stuart, the Borderers on both sides indulged in a perfect orgy of
faction fights, and the two Governments were concerned more with their own
police work than in quarrels with one another. Berwick, now one of the three
best fortified places in Europe, had no longer any fear of Border raids,
while it made an admirable police headquarters for several thousand men.
Lord Hunsdon, the Queen's "dear cousin," is a name inseparably connected
with Berwick through this stormy period as ,grand policeman-in-chief, and it
is small wonder, as a contemporary remarks, that this strenuous official
lost all taste for field sports in the greater excitement of hunting and
hanging the rievers of Ettrick and Jedburgh, and the dales of Rede and Tyne.
Happily a few sections of the old blood-drenched
Edwardian walls, though mainly as grass-grown mounds, still survive. For
Berwick had shrunk no little by the Tudor period, and the new lines were for
the most part drawn considerably within the old defences. From the water
tower, still in part surviving on the river bank above the town and just
outside it, the Edwardian outer wall at a yet fair elevation climbs the
steep grassy hillside to the railway station that covers the castle site.
Away up at the high back of the town towards Scotland are grass-grown
remains of the old wall, for the repairs of which so many successive kings
and governors laid taxes on the sea-board trade and personal labour of the
long-suffering townsfolk. To work out in detail the lines of either of these
or of the Tudor fortifications is not our business here, and it has been
admirably done in handy form by local experts. But I must not pass over the
Octagonal Bell Tower which still, amid the suggestive grassy humps of
turf-clad masonry, and with some dignity of isolation, looks northward
towards Scotland and eastwards over the North Sea. The casual visitor will
probably be told by the uncritical local patriot, that this is the actual
belfry that gave warning of the first glint of Scottish spears in the days
of Bruce or the Black Douglas. Unfortunately this is barely half the truth,
for this one here is a second edition, erected by the Tudor engineers of the
later works upon the foundations of the old round tower which actually
heralded these scenes of blood.
The old mediaeval wall at Berwick, as elsewhere,
was a plain curtain, punctuated at regular intervals with towers. Those who
have seen Conway will have gathered the best idea of what a mediieval walled
town looked like, for to-day it is still quite perfect, and it might be a
picture out of Froissart. The sudden jump from this to the new methods which
Italian engineers introduced to keel) pace with improved artillery is
amazing. Lucca, Verona, and Antwerp were the three first towns in Europe to
adopt it, and Berwick here was the fourth. For tolerably obvious reasons,
Berwick is now left as the sole example to the curious in such matters of a
famous era in military history. Yet to the chance stranger, who between
trains should find himself promenading for a mile or more over smooth walks
laid upon these tremendous high-perched ramparts, they would assuredly
suggest some relic of the great Napoleon, of scarce a century ago, rather
than the precautions of a Tudor monarch. For here are not walls in the
ordinary sense, but huge earthworks with a perpendicular front of masonry
some twenty to thirty feet high and nearly half as thick, the outer face
being well laid with dressed and mortared stone. At regular intervals in
this massive curtain are projecting bastions of equal or greater height
provided with "flankers" and reached by long subways arched in by brick or
stone. The platforms
and stairways are all in good preservation, and the arrangements for
enfilading the curtain walls complete. This more immediately applies to the
two higher sides of the irregular square which the works describe around the
town, those facing the north and east. The other sides rest chiefly upon the
river. A nobler and more suggestive promenade has no town in Britain than
that round Berwick walls, nor are they disfigured or obscured by outlying
slums or suburbs, but for the most part plant their feet cleanly upon
pleasant meadows, while the town behind presses close up to their shelter
and helps to complete the effect as of an ancient place of arms. Much of the
stone for the Tudor fortifications was taken from the old walls, the rest
was limestone from the adjoining seashore. This all sounds very nice and
easy, but the great Eliza was a deplorable paymaster. Poor Rowland Johnson,
who was overseer to all these works for twenty years, ultimately died of his
efforts to wring adequate remuneration out of her for his labours. Hunsdon,
the famous Governor who represented the Queen here for thirty years, and was
a great favourite with her, had many a weary time, and cut grim jokes on the
parsimony of his royal" cousin, "protesting that while the grass grows the
steed starves," and that he was "fed on pap made from the yolk of an owl's
egg." These dark sayings were the result of a letter from the Queen when the
money for expenses was long overdue, which began, "I doubt not, my Harry,
whether that the victory (which occasioned the expense) more joyed me, or
that you were by God appointed the instrument of my glory . . . but that you
may not think that you have done nothing for your people, I intend to make
the journey somewhat to increase your livelihood, that you may say to
yourself, 'Perditum quod factum est ingrato.' "We know, however, that
Hunsdon said nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, made use of
altogether different expressions, and those, too, in the vulgar tongue.
Elizabeth kept very sharp eyes, though, on Berwick, and seems even to have
grudged her harassed deputies an occasional holiday in some haven where the
Borderer and the creditor ceased from troubling and the north-east winds
were at rest. For while absent on one of these well-earned jaunts Hunsdon's
son writes him in a hurry from London that the Queen, while playing cards in
the presence-chamber, called him to her and asked when his father was
returning to Berwick, upon which he informed her that the Governor intended
to get back soon after Whitsuntide, that day being already the eighth of
June, "Whereat she flew into a great rage, beginning with 'God's wounds' (we
are not told what this great adept at forcible language ended up with), and
that she would 'set you by the feet, and send another in your place."
Numbers of illustrious Scots, including Knox and
other divines who occasionally found it a handy refuge from ecclesiastical
opponents who could split hairs as truculently as themselves, or from sons
of Belial, bishops, and such like, paid friendly visits to Berwick about
this time, and walked upon the new fortifications, to their great amazement
and edification. For us to-day, curious and interesting in detail as are the
works upon which this noblest of civic promenades is laid, the pulse is
stirred more quickly perhaps by the opportunity they give you of grasping at
a glance, and feeling to your marrow, if you have got any feeling, the full
spirit and significance of the spot. For beside you, under the clear,
unsullied canopy of the summer sky, lies this quiet market town enclosed
within virtually the same embattled bounds, planted upon the same streets
and wynds, as in the long past, when for centuries it knew no rest, and was
the cockpit of the nations. Below, Tweed sweeps along the gathered tribute
of a thousand mountain streams into the open sea as a noble salmon river
should, the life of its mountain-born waters not yet extinguished by its
brief tidal course, and battling gallantly with the salt waves about the
narrow harbour bar. Away beyond Tweedmouth and Spittal, not, it must be
admitted, worthy vis-a-vis of Berwick, the coast of Northumberland forges
away to the long sandy flats of Holy Island with its solitary castle-crowned
crag, and further yet to the dim uplifted mass of Baznburgh, the ancient
capital of Northumbria, the rock fortress of "the Flamebearer" marking the
limit of our southern outlook.
All the world that reads English—all such part
of it, at least, that has been properly nurtured in its mother tongue—will
expect the Cheviots to be in evidence from Berwick walls. And so, of course,
they are, massing conspicuous upon the sky-line and carrying southwestward
along their lonely crests the border-line between the kingdoms that Tweed
has carried to their foothills. We have had enough for the present of
battles, or it would be easy enough to pick over the country, spreading its
broad Northumbrian fields and spacious Northumbrian landscape from Berwick
to the Cheviots, and fill a chapter with the battles and sieges and forays
that its landmarks call to mind. Indeed I have already done so in another
place, (The Romance of Northumberland.) and we are this time in the way of
setting our faces northward.
There is no great store of ancient buildings in
Berwick. Every vestige of the religious houses has vanished. In the upper
part of the town there are some noteworthy open spaces known as "Greens,"
while the barracks, just two centuries old, were the first erected in the
kingdom. The evils of billeting in a place so heavily and constantly
garrisoned with all sorts of troops had been sorely felt. The men, too,
under this system were out of control at night, and preyed remorselessly on
the inhabitants. "The innkeepers," says a correspondent of that time, "could
stand it no longer, and were all giving up their houses, and reputable
persons who had been well-to-do were now reduced to begging their bread,
from the continued exactions of their gallant defenders." In the lower
quarters of the town there are some quaint wynds and corners of stern and
sombre aspect, interesting from the fact that they are more or less
interwoven with the town wall. The latter by the river-side follows the old
Edwardian lines, while the unpretentious wharves where Berwick's fishing
fleet forgather and her limited sea-borne trade is conducted, contribute a
harmonious feature to this characteristic quarter of the town. Just here,
too, is the picturesque old bridge of fifteen arches and nearly 400 yards in
length. It was built in the reign of James I., and as everything in Berwick
has the distinction of being unconventional, the first nine arches are all
of different span. Yet more, the structure itself is, and always has been,
the property of the Crown, not of the town or county, an annual subsidy
being granted for its upkeep, and thereby placing another singularity to the
credit of Berwick. It took a dozen years in the building, carried on out of
funds from the Crown Treasury. For when partially completed the work was
demolished by the violence of a flood which hurled the old wooden bridge,
then still in use above it, against the half-finished work with disastrous
effect. Several arches of Berwick Bridge were not so very long ago in the
county of Durham, as if the status of Berwick itself were not sufficiently
confusing to the uninitiated without allotting half its bridge to the next
county but one, which, as a matter of fact, possessed at that time a strip
along the Tweed. But Berwick is nothing if not original. The Northumbrian "borh"
runs up to the Tweed, the lowland Doric runs down to it; and it is idle to
pretend that the average native does not speak one or other of these kindred
tongues. But apart front this, I am assured by a friend who is a native of
Berwick, an etymologist, and expert in northern vernaculars, that the town
has a distinct dialect of its own, used by the common folk bred within the
walls. As he can illustrate it admirably himself, this turned my attention
to the street-corner original, which in a few odd weeks' sojourn, with the
ordinary varieties of Border dialect prevailing, one would fail to notice.
The peculiar vernacular of the little Palatinate has sounds and notes in it
utterly alien to the districts on either side, such as "hutehar" and "doetar"
with a mute r. My friend is of the opinion that southern regiments quartered
here for protracted periods may have produced this hybrid but fixed speech
among a certain class.
In recalling the extraordinary vicissitudes of Berwick, particularly that
abrupt descent under Edward's devastations from a great commercial seaport
to a merely garrison town of great importance, and then its collapse, after
the union of the Crowns, to a purely provincial town, one is speaking, of
course, from a national point of view. For in the eighteenth century Berwick
had all the social attributes of a county capital, though it was not one
technically. There was a Iarge garrison, and a considerable residential
element in the usually accepted sense of the word. Lairds and squires, too,
from both sides of the river, dined and drank and danced there. Its glory in
this sense has now long departed, Iike the glory of other provincial towns.
Nor has it caught the fancy of the modern rentier, nor even to an
appreciable extent of the summer visitor. Spittal, a sort of extension of
Tweedmouth at the mouth of the river, faces the open sea, with a Iong grey
terrace of lodging-houses, their depressing architectural aspect redeemed,
no doubt, in the eyes of their patrons by the pleasant strip of sand on to
which their uncompromising portals give immediate access. The high ground
south of Tweedmouth, on which of yore so many invading hosts pitched their
tents, seems to be always casting sombre shadows over Spittal, and
accentuates the unmirthful complexion with which it appears to confront the
unalleviated rage of the north and east winds. This exposure perhaps
constitutes its very merit in the August season, for babes and sucklings
are, I believe, despatched hither in force from the humid, smoky cities of
western Scotland to roll on the sand under the strong breath of the North
Sea, while their guardians find mild excitement in watching the salmon nets
which thrice a day, for two or three hours at a time, empty their stores on
to Spittal sands.
Berwick also his its summer following, who occupy its rather Iimited and
unenterprising accommodation, bathe in the rocky coves, play golf of a
happy-go-lucky domestic nature, cricket or bowls on the broad green ledge
between the eastern ramparts and the cliff edge, or pace the long stone pier
where also the salmon fishers ply their task. But in these days, when almost
every place outside a city, irrespective of any visible attractions,
harbours the summer visitor to the extent, and often to more than the
extent, of its boor ability, the patrons of Berwick cannot be called a
numerous company, and make no pretension to be a. fashionable one. Yet the
air is splendid for those who like to be braced, and the whole atmosphere is
clean and sweet. The town in a human sense has always the sufficiently
cheerful stir of a, big provincial mart and even a little more in the summer
season, for those who find comfort in such things rather than in the
ever-abiding atmosphere of an illustrious past that is written all over it.
To the south Holy Island, Bamburgh, and the fine golf links at Goswick are
all virtually within sight. To the westward a line of railway follows the
Tweed to Norham, Coldstream, the Flodden country, Kelso, and the land of
Scott. Northward the rockbound coast of Berwickshire pursues its rugged
course of cliff and cove to the sublime and lofty solitudes of St. Abb's and
beyond. But the status
of Berwick as a watering-place is of small relevance to our subject. It is
more worth noting how few Southerners of the thousands who fly northward
every summer think it worth while to have a look at it. After all, the
average mortal cares mighty little about the past. It conveys almost nothing
to him, and he submits only to such monuments of it that have been
conspicuously labelled, and that he cannot with decency ignore. Berwick has
not been thus labelled, and if you told a friend you were going there, he
would almost certainly think that you were off to North Berwick (in East
Lothian) to play golf. That, at least, has been my own experience. I have
been a good deal in Berwick at one time and another, and have sometimes been
fortunate in the companionship of Commander Norman, R.N., who is chairman of
the Berwick Historical Monuments Committee, that has clone so much for the
ancient town. As it is not possible to deal here with the technicalities of
the fortifications, Edwardian or Tudor, it may be well to state that this
zealous antiquary has embodied his intimate knowledge of them with
illuminating brevity in a pamphlet that may be acquired at any local
bookshop. During a recent sojourn in Berwick an episode occurred in
connection with the walls, that provided a more humorous aftermath than
might be expected of anything so serious as excavations. In digging the
foundations for a new house near the Edwardian walls, a stone coffin was
unearthed bearing the significant letters E.I. Deeply graven as is the
memory of Edward I. in a town whose population he almost destroyed within
twenty-four hours and in cold blood, we all know that he met his fate upon
the Western March, and was buried, as is credibly recorded, at Westminster.
But the magic letters were too much for some enthusiasts, too potent even
for accepted facts, and quite a sharp controversy raged. When this was at
its height a young man came forward and deposed before a magistrate that he
had carved the letters himself a few days previously. Whether he had idly
traced his sweetheart's initials or had sufficient history to attempt a
practical joke on the sages of Berwick, though the sages themselves scoffed
at the theory, I do not remember. But the opposite party threw discredit on
the declaration of the frolicsome joker till one or two others came forward
and solemnly deposed that they had seen him do it. Thus ended a nine days'
wonder which through the daily Press raised a laugh on every breakfast table
from Newcastle to Edinburgh, and was borne by the local weekly to the lonely
haunts of Lammermoor and Cheviot shepherds, to their great delight as I
discovered later. For hill shepherds are generally antiquaries of a sort.
Indeed they live and move among the tracks and lines of the dead, and cannot
help themselves besides, they are men of mind and character.
The salmon has, of course, always stood by
Berwick through good and evil times alike. The little fishing-cobbles, with
their broad flat sterns and cocked-up bows, are to-day a feature of the
river the whole way up to Norham. to-day Many of the net fishings in the
lower reaches of the Tweed are the property of, or are rented by a company
who have a large number of fishermen in their employment. So the fat and
lean periods which are so associated with this hardy race under ordinary
conditions are in this case the lot of the stockholders, who, no doubt, can
face the worst. As a matter of fact, I believe the company pays a pretty
regular dividend, ranging front five to fifteen per cent., a situation which
has a painfully prosaic ring when associated with that noble denizen of a
romantic river, the Tweed salmon.
The Tweed is administered by a Board of
Commissioners, whose rights extend for five miles out. to sea, and thirty
miles north and south, within which area of 150 square miles, with the
exception of about ten or a dozen fishing stations on the shore, no one is
allowed to fish for salmon at any time of the year, by any method of
capture—a restriction, I believe, no little grumbled at by the sea-goers,
and not always regarded.
The herring fishing and its accessory
industries, such as curing, is of importance to Berwick, as it is to every
other place along this coast, and the red-sailed smacks crossing the bar to
swell the volume of their fellows that in the early autumn fleck the North
Sea, is a characteristic feature of the river life.
Nor would Berwick be Berwick without its
Freemen, though there are impious wights who declare it would be better
without them, or a good many of them. For the old town owns a slice of the
landed property around it —thanks in great part to the exuberant good nature
at a propitious moment of James I.—carrying a rental value of some thousands
a year. A substantial portion of this is divided annually among the Freemen
of Berwick, of whom, however, there are so many that the individual incomes
derived therefrom are not large enough to benefit the reasonably prosperous,
but just sufficient to tempt the lowly to loaf. There is an ancient school,
too, where the Freeman received, if he desired, gratuitous teaching ; but in
these days of free compulsory education, to say nothing of free meals
provided by the much-enduring tax-payer, the Freeman's school, is not, I
believe, in very great demand. These privileges, such as they be, besides,
of course, the historic flavour attaching to them, which probably very few
of the beneficiaries feel, are matters of inheritance, (All sons become
Freemen as soon as they are of ago and choose to go through the ceremony
and—needless to say—pay the fee.) the eldest son being automatically a
Freeman, and the others becoming so by a nominal payment. The honour, as in
similar endowments, can also he purchased, }nit not on such terms as to
attract the outsider. 'Those who are capable of taking a pride in being a
Freeman of Berwick, which I should certainly do if I were one, are doubtless
of the type to whom the emoluments are of small account. But nevertheless it
is an interesting and picturesque survival of what was a matter of great
moment in former days. Many persons, again, were made Freemen for services
rendered to the town; some being thus favoured to whom the town owed money
that it could not pay. Illustrious persons, too—dukes, field-marshals, and
such like—of national fame have been placed on the list, not so much because
Berwick honoured them, as that they honoured Berwick, and were assuredly not
likely to claim their share of the soil or its spoils or to demand a free
education for their offspring at the Freemen's Academy. My critics have
sometimes been kind enough to say that in historical philanderings I know
when to stop and to anticipate the yawn provoked by satiety. I trust that I
have not forfeited their good opinion in this chapter. I am perfectly
certain, on the other hand, that some Berwickians will protest that my sins
of omission are unpardonable. Not a word, for instance, has been said of the
Countess of Buchan, who was kept in a cage in the castle for four years for
putting the crown on the head of Robert Bruce, or of the frequent sojourns
here of Cromwell and of Charles I. and of the hanging of "Seton's sons." But
I have long hardened my heart in this sense to the local patriot to whom the
forbearance of the general reader is neither here nor there. Perhaps I know
him better—the reader, I mean. If I did not, I feel sure the publishers and
I would long ago have parted company. |
