On 26 March 1603 Robert Carey staggered into James VI’s bedchamber at Holyrood to announce his succession to the English throne. For James, it was the defining moment in his life, the glittering prize that for so long he had striven. For Carey, exhausted after his three-day ride from London, it was his opportunity to secure a heady future at the English court. No longer would he be confined to the turbulent wastelands of his wardenry in the Middle March of the English Borderlands.² For his Scottish counterpart too, the recently ennobled Robert Ker, Lord Roxburgh, it marked the beginning...

In administrative terms, in the reign of James VI, the Borders were divided into three sections. These included the area stretching back some miles from the frontier line itself, which formed the administrative regions of the East, Middle and West Marches. There was a similar framework to the south of the border which formed the English East, Middle and West Marches, though their boundaries did not meet their Scottish counterparts at the same points on the frontier. The national frontier of the the Scottish Middle March coincided with half of that of the English East March and all of the...

It is a truism that the Middle March’s geographical location on the frontier between two periodically hostile kingdoms affected its political, administrative, social, economical and cultural circumstances. The presence of that borderline inevitably meant that the Middle March developed borderspecific characteristics that differentiated the region from Lowland Scotland. Additionally, the topographical nature of the land, moors, hills and ‘wastelands’, separated from the Lothians by the buttresses of the Moorfoot Hills and the Lammermuirs, contributes to an impression of an area ‘apart’ from its lowland neighbours: an ‘out-countrey’ divided from the ‘incuntry’; the barbarian dales from the ‘lawlands’; a region on...

James VI inherited a system of government from his late medieval forebears that was heavily dependent upon co-operative nobles and lairds governing their regions in line with crown policy. Such reliance did not necessarily mean, however, that government was less effective as a result, for the crown could secure the co-operation of regional elites with lands, titles and offices that further legitimised and underwrote the authority of these prominent figures.¹ It was a mutually dependent, and beneficial, relationship, and borderers, like lowlanders and highlanders, had much to gain from co-operating with the crown, as did the crown in retaining their...

The surnames, and their associated obligations of kinship and alliance, provided a framework for the exercise of power within the Middle March, as elsewhere. The socio-political structure of the march was also subject to external influences: the effects of the Reformation, socio-economic change and, of course, Anglo-Scottish relations. Predominant, however, amongst these was the impact of the government of James VI, which, from 1586 onwards, was determined to strengthen its presence throughout Scotland. The ‘fitted carpet’ of crown authority was unfurling to include not just the ‘lawlands’ of the centre, but also Scotland’s periphery, the ‘outcuntrey’.¹ The mechanisms that James...

In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was a movement towards more centralised control of the administration of justice. What was remarkable was the apparent lack of local resistance to the intensifying presence of the king’s government. The crown had made the regional elites feel part of this evolving structure of government by including them within it, not only in their own regions but within government at its highest levels as well. This seems particularly true of the Middle March. This chapter looks at how figures from the region participated in the government of the kingdom, and how...

The networks of power in the Middle March and their direct linkage to central government could provide the crown with a system with which to fulfill its objectives in the region, including the suppression of crime, if it had the will to do so. There can be little argument that widespread crime did take place: there was report enough of theft, reset,¹ feud, violence and cross-border raiding from both English and Scottish sources. Many of these crimes, particularly feuding, were common to the rest of Scotland. The march’s proximity to England, however, occasioned specific types of crime and there were...

The previous chapters have shown how the history of the Middle March from 1573 to 1625 should be seen within the context of developments that affected the whole realm: broader changes in crown policy towards its localities and in judicial matters, the evolution of kingship and government, the changing nature of lordship and the resultant gradual social evolution. The Middle March may have been on the periphery of Scotland but it was not an area separated from the kingdom. Its prominent figures were involved in central government and that government was able to make itself felt within the march if...

Crown policy in the Middle March had always been affected by external considerations, in particular relations with England. Whilst successive Scottish governments had used disturbances in the Borders as a form of leverage in diplomatic negotiations with England, so had some governments, such as that of Morton, attempted to use the imposition of order to encourage amicable relations. In 1597 James’s border policy was affected by a number of concerns, in particular his succession to the English throne, which had led to his involvement in secret negotiations with the earl of Essex. James was keen that these should not be...

James’s portrayal of the Borders to the English parliament in 1607 owed more to wishful thinking than to reality. Similarly hopeful had been his pronouncement in 1604 that the geographical unity of Scotland and England was ‘by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discerne their owne limits’.² With such protestations James intended to convince a sceptical, somewhat hostile, English audience of the benefits of the ‘union of the crowns’: if the English recognised these, they might agree to extend the dynastic union into a full political or...