The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers
Himself a child of the Borders, Fraser writes with an insider’s love and a scholar’s knowledge, taking us from the very moment Hadrian builds his wall, through the beginning of the problems between England and Scotland in 1286, through the Long Good-Night of 1603 which ends the reiver period.
Fraser keeps his focus squarely on the Borders and the impact of more than three centuries of war and banditry there, never allowing himself to be distracted from the people by the larger picture of the politics of the time. Along the way we meet such notables as the Goodwife of Kirkudbright, who in Henry VIII’s reign is forced to turn her husband over to the enemy for safekeeping, and learn how the reivers lived, about their family backgrounds and clan alliances, and most of all, about how they operated what to them was simply a way of life, though others saw it as thievery, extortion, kidnapping, torture, blackmail, cattle-rustling, terrorism, and more.
This is the only book I know of dealing directly with the reivers themselves, and it is wonderfully written in Fraser’s clear and compulsively readable style, intensely resonant of its time and place. Even if you think you have absolutely no interest in 16th-century Lowland Scotland, you will find this book fascinating, like a package tour into the past.
