Reavers

Books read this week: The Steel Bonnets (George MacDonald Fraser) 7/10

It's been a busy week, so this'll be a fairly short post. The Steel Bonnets is subtitled "The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers", and is a fairly comprehensive history of the border between Scotland and England during the 16th Century. It's a fascinating period, which I didn't know much about, when half the population of the border counties supported itself by robbing the other half. It was a romantic period, with something of the feel of the Wild West, populated by larger than life ruffians with names like Jock O' The Side, Edom O Gordon and Kinmont Willie, with very little real law except the blood feud.

As Fraser makes very clear, it wasn't a particularly nice place to live, and the reavers (alternate spelling: reivers. The latter is less likely to get confused with Firefly, which is why I haven't used it.) were not particularly nice people. Nevertheless, there is, I think, a certain romantic attraction to going your own way, without society to hold you down, and stories of the border speak to that.

The most interesting thing about the book for me, apart from finding out about the real individuals behind some of the ballads which I am fond of, was the insight into Scottish history; I've picked up bits and pieces here and there from relatives, and when it intersects with English history (Bannockburn, Culloden, Towton), but I've never really made a proper study of it - an oversight I intend to rectify. The version of history given in the Steel Bonnets justifies the old joke that the Scots spend their history engages in a mortal struggle with their arch-enemies - the Scots. There's a bewildering chaotic swirl of changing allegiances, rising and falling fortunes and foreign intervention. I was, for example, quite unaware the Henry VIII (the poster boy for psychotic manchild) had decided that the best way to induce Mary Queen of Scots to marry the future Edward VI was to overrun her kingdom with fire and the sword. Not, given Henry's personality, that it was particularly surprising, but it's something that tends to get overlooked in the Anglo-centric histories I tend to read.