if it does not
always command our approval, when we come to consider the lives and
characters of the Border Reivers.

I.

THE AULD ENEMY.

"Near a Border frontier, in the time of war,
There's ne'er a man, but he's a freebooter."--SATCHELLS.

There are few more remarkable phenomena in the political or social life of
Scotland than what is familiarly known as "Border Reiving." In olden times
it prevailed along the whole line of the Borders from Berwick to the
Solway, embracing the counties of Berwick, Roxburgh, Selkirk, Peebles, and
Dumfries. During a period of some three or four hundred years these
districts were chiefly inhabited by hordes of moss-troopers, who made it
the chief business of their lives to harry and despoil their English
neighbours. On every convenient opportunity the Scottish reivers crossed
the Border, and carried off whatever came readiest to hand--horses, cows,
sheep, "insight and outsight," nothing coming amiss to them unless it was
either too heavy or too hot. Those on the English side who were thus
despoiled were not slow to retaliate, and generally succeeded, to some
extent, in making good the losses they sustained. This system of plunder
and reprisal ultimately attained an extraordinary development. All
classes, from the Chief of the clan to the meanest serf over whom he
ruled, were engaged in it. Indeed it must be frankly admitted that the
most notorious thieves were often those who had least excuse for indulging
in such nefarious practices--gentlemen in high position like the Scotts,
Kers, Johnstones, and Maxwells, and who in many cases had been chosen by
the Government to repress the reiving propensities of their clans and
followers.

Some who have made a superficial acquaintance with this remarkable phase
of Border life have rushed to the conclusion that the great Border Chiefs,
and those over whom they exercised a kind of patriarchal authority, must
have been dowered with a "double dose of original sin." In proof of this
it is pointed out that a widely different state of affairs prevailed in
other parts of the country, for example in Fife, and the Lothians, and
generally speaking, throughout the whole of the west of Scotland, and
consequently the only way in which they can account for the singular
condition of the Borders is by predicating an essentially lower moral
type. We do not believe that this theory, plausible though it may appear,
will bear a moment's serious consi