Border reivers

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Border reivers were raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border. They included both English and Scottish people, and they raided the entire border country without regard to their victims' nationality. They operated in a culture of legalised raiding and feuding. Their heyday was in the last hundred years of their existence, during the time of the House of Stuart in the Kingdom of Scotland and the House of Tudor in the Kingdom of England. The historian G. M. Trevelyan summed up Border society by writing: Like the Homeric Greeks, the Borderers were cruel and barbarous men, slaying each other like beasts of the forest, but high in pride and honour and rough faithfulness. Amidst centuries of lawlessness, poverty and low-intensity conflict, compounded by significant invasions along the Anglo-Scottish frontier, familial groups gradually coalesced into organised units of common defence and offence based on kinship, giving rise to what would later be formalised as the 'Surnames.' The reivers emerged...

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