With all this additional aggravation from armed, horseback gangs, it’s easy to see why, at the time of attack, people would either a) hide in a hedge until the gang had ridden past or b) focus on walling up your valuables, human, animal and otherwise, in the nearest peel tower or defendable yard.
View from the East Fellside towards the Lake District Penrith’s 13 th century town seal – a brass medallion featuring a cross of St Andrew’s – is considered to be an early casualty, turning up 600 years later under a hedge at Brampton, outside Carlisle. Naming this time The Era of the Border Reivers rather over-aggrandises a period when communities from one side or other of the border area would take a day’s ride towards a well-off household or community, with the aim of nicking stuff, be it livestock or church silver or whatever else came to hand.
And, as isn’t rare, the method they chose also functioned to get their young disaffected to focus their dissatisfaction on people outside their own community – it was, in a way, a morale-booster, awful though it sounds. So, as always happens when people can’t feed their own, people invented their own way to address the economic balance. An ancient inheritance custom on the Scottish side also meant that land was divided equally amongst sons when a father died, so men had smaller and smaller patches of land on which to raise their cattle and their wealth, their families and their worth. The land was thin, then as now, and the only real way to create value was to raise cattle. Carlisle had been tossed between kings for centuries – Edward I himself died at Burgh-by-Sands at the end of one campaign with the Scots – but as time went on the real problem was increasing poverty in areas around the borders. From the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), long-standing poor relations between Scots and Cumbrians deteriorated into a pattern that would last for three hundred years. As a result, communities broke down and re-formed, and traditional communal obligations became looser.Ĭumberland – the northern part of Cumbria – had an additional problem. Villages disappeared, not only because they failed to function when half the agricultural labourers, the miller and the baker had died, but because those people who survived realised that their labour was now so valuable that they could flog their skills to the highest bidder… likely in the next village or two down the road. This is probably connected to the de-population of the country following the first major Black Death, when perhaps as much as half of the population died in a few years. The hue and cry system worked well until somewhere around the mid-14 th century. But there seems to be plenty of evidence that finding and turning in criminals was a legal responsibility in the pre-Norman version of the feudal system and in all truth, likely represents the way wrongdoing was managed for millennia. If someone killed your pig, abducted your wife, stole a fork or murdered your aunt, you yelled very loudly and neighbours, friends and passers-by were all equally required to chase after the felon, apprehend him/her and hand them over to the constable, who would then turn him over to the justices for punishment.Īny historical dictionary will tell you that ‘hue and cry’ comes from the Anglo-Norman phrase, ‘hu e cri’ and from that, people can assume it was an introduction of the Norman Conquest. Before that, law for ordinary folks had been kept by common agreement enacted via an elected constable and the ‘hue and cry’ system.
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