Summary
Summary
Two years ago, Graham Robb moved to a lonely house on the very edge of England, near the banks of a river that once marked the southern boundary of the legendary Debatable Land. The oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain, the Debatable Land served as a buffer between Scotland and England. It was once the bloodiest region in the country, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James V. After most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of the state. Today, it has vanished from the map and its boundaries are matters of myth and generational memories.Under the spell of a powerful curiosity, Robb began a journey that would uncover lost towns and roads, and unlock more than one discovery of major historical significance. These personal and scholarly adventures reveal a tale that spans Roman, Medieval, and present-day Britain.Rich in detail and epic in scope, The Debatable Land takes us from a time when neither England nor Scotland existed to the present day, when contemporary nationalism and political turmoil threaten to unsettle the cross-border community once more. With his customary charm, wit, and literary grace, Graham Robb proves the Debatable Land to be a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Robb's move to the singular "Debatable Land" on the border of present-day England and Scotland inspired this combination bicycle travelogue, regional history, and declaration of admiration. Covering 33,000 acres on either side of the Scottish-English border, this uninhabited middle ground originally, in ancient times, served as communal ("bateable") livestock pastures, Robb (The Discovery of Middle Earth) explains, preserving a historically delicate balance in a region where family loyalty rules and accents vary significantly over a few miles. Later, a core group of families, like the Armstrongs and Nixons, made up the "reivers," who made their living stealing livestock and household goods, leaving burned houses in their wake and introducing the words "blackmail" and "bereaved" into English. Robb's passion for cycling and amiable persona provide him with a ground-level view, allowing him to observe how the reality of life in the borderlands differs from the myths, such as the inaccurate story that blames a curved ditch obstacle on "Anglo-Scottish strife." Focusing on this one remarkable region, Robb's two-wheeled perspective and highly observant eye allow him to ruminate through the Celtic, medieval, and present eras with ease; readers are lucky to join him on his enthralling journey. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The historian and biographer traverses perhaps the oldest national land boundary in Europe as he explores a once independent, and very bloody, territory In 2010, the historian and biographer Graham Robb decided to leave his Oxford home for what he describes as ¿a lonely house on the very edge of England¿, so close to the brink that Scotland begins where his land ends. This border, Robb suggests, is probably the oldest national land boundary in Europe, little changed in its course since William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, made Cumbria an English colony in 1092. It marches along the watershed of the Cheviot hills and the valley of the Tweed, a diagonal that strikes north-east from the Solway Firth until it reaches the North Sea just above Berwick: a political boundary that looks as though nature intended it, for most of the way. Only at its western end is the geography less helpful. There, until the anomaly was resolved in the mid-16th century, the boundary split into two to encircle an area of 50 square miles that belonged to neither side, known as the Debatable Land. Three rivers, the Liddel, Esk and Sark, ran at its edges and it had sea access along a mile of Solway coast. Confusingly, its name has its origins in the old English word ¿battable¿, meaning pastureland fit to fatten cattle, rather than in arguments over its ownership. Robb asserts that it represents ¿the oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain¿, with deep roots that predate the nations of Scotland and England and even the colonists of the Roman empire. According to Robb, the Debatable Land sits at the fulcrum of British history ¿ a ¿missing piece in the puzzle¿, the last part of Britain to be conquered and brought under the control of the state. These claims sound extravagant, but the author builds a persuasive case for them in a book that recounts his six-year investigation into the history of his new surroundings in Liddesdale, the valley of the Liddel. One of his house¿s previous owners, the late Tory politician Nicholas Ridley (later Baron Ridley of Liddesdale), acquired it as a rural retreat in the 1980s when he was approaching the peak of his considerable unpopularity. In a narrative that describes the author¿s bicycle journeys across some of England¿s most beautiful and least visited landscapes, and spends so much time in the past, it comes as a surprise to see Ridley¿s name. But there it is. And there too is a significant memento of his ownership: a red button set in a brass plate that once connected Robb¿s front room to the local police station. Robb has a good eye for the small and seemingly ordinary things that convey a sense of remoteness ¿ of place and time. In fact, Liddesdale is not all that remote; a bus from the little city of Carlisle will take you there in not much more than half an hour. But when he says that the bewildering topography of the ¿wood-darkened valley¿ make his house almost impossible to locate ¿ in 2005, it nearly burned to the ground while fire engines ¿roamed the lanes, searching for a means of access¿ ¿ then it can seem as distant and evanescent as Brigadoon. The young Walter Scott, reaching Liddesdale from north of the border on a ruin-inspecting and ballad-collecting trip in 1792, described it as a ¿wild and inaccessible district¿ that had once been ¿the bloodiest valley in Britain¿. Scott represented modernity: he arrived in the first wheeled vehicle many people in Liddesdale had ever seen, at which they ¿stared with no small wonder¿. But what he was after was the pre-modern, the violent romance of long-vanished Border reivers and moss-troopers, which his writing soon implanted in the imagination of Europe. Sorting out the fact from the fiction in this history is one of Robb¿s tasks. He tackles some serious misconceptions about the borderland; the notion, for example, that a borderer must have been, at heart, either English or Scottish; and that the Debatable Land was ¿the unviable remnant of an otherwise extinct world¿. In fact, the border clans such as the Armstrongs and the Grahams were far from proto-nationalists; they were brigands and cattle thieves loyal only to themselves and their surname. And yet neither were they savages held in check by two nations: they had in the middle ages what Robb calls a ¿fully developed, indigenous legal system¿ distinct from the laws passed in Edinburgh and London. The reivers could certainly be bloodthirsty ¿ they are popularly supposed to be the origin of the word ¿bereaved¿ ¿ but their Border law, with its code of punishment and compensation, might have helped keep the borderland as a buffer zone between two rival powers. In particular, it preserved the Debatable Land as a place devoted to cattle grazing, free of conflict because human settlement was forbidden, until the moral order broke down in the 16th century and the invading Armstrongs and Grahams imported their traditions of butchery. Few authors write so well about things lost and neglected ¿ or have such sharp ears and eyes for the natural world A document of 1249 describes this local system of justice as ¿ancient as lovable customs¿, and Robb speculates that then and for some time after it might have been ¿the last and still lively remnant of the remote period when the post-Roman kingdoms of Strathclyde and Northumbria had straddled the future frontier¿. Later, he decides that the origins of the Debatable Land stretch back even before that time, to its role as a trysting place for three Celtic tribes, the Damnonii, the Votadini and the Selgovae, whose territories meet at this point. By now Robb¿s quest, which began as a mild curiosity about his new whereabouts, has developed into a professional obsession. Bike rides to see the remains of castles and peel towers have been supplemented by trips to archives in Carlisle and Edinburgh and a scholarly reinterpretation of ancient maps. An account that begins with the local and domestic ¿ bus journeys on icy Cumbrian roads ¿ goes on to describe the library at sunny Alexandria in 150AD, where Ptolemy is creating his map of the known world. Robb intercuts the past and present, the intimate and the impersonal, to wonderful effect. Few authors write so well about things lost and neglected ¿ or have such sharp ears and eyes for the natural world. There is, perhaps, the undertow of a political purpose in all this. Like another recent writer about the borderland, the Tory MP Rory Stewart, Robb comes to the place keen to discover that the people on either side are more alike as borderers than they are different as citizens of Scotland and England. (Like this reviewer, Robb was born in Lancashire of Scottish parents: unionism may come naturally to him.) The Scottish referendum of 2014 kept this hope alive, but the next referendum dashed it. Cumbria on the English side of the border voted 60.1% to leave the EU; the Borders region of Scotland voted 58.5% to remain. Here was proof, Robb writes, that an ¿administrative fiction, the border, which for so long had been an irrelevance to the people of the borderlands, was hardening into a political reality¿. - Ian Jack.
Kirkus Review
Robb (The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts, 2013, etc.) uses his vast knowledge of Celtic history, languages, and geography to create a fascinating book of history and adventure.Regarding the strange story of what is called the "Debatable Land," the author turns to writings both ancient and modern as he applies archaeological methods to history. This 33,000-acre site is the oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain. It is devoid of archaeological evidence between the Roman period and the 1500s, which leads Robb to posit that perhaps it was just uninhabitable. Located northeast of the Solway Firth above Cumbria's Lake District, it was a no-man's land, a buffer neither Scottish nor English, and open to murder and mayhem by parliamentary decrees of both countries. Until nearly the 1600s, no buildings or cultivation were allowed, and cattle could pasture only between sunrise and sunset. Cattle thieves plied their trade in a reasonably civilized manner governed by March law, a code common and efficient to both sides and unique to the area. It governed the use of hostages to prevent reprisals, established the traditional days of truce, and ensured compliance. On the truce days, livestock owners would receive the value of the stolen animals in money, corn, or merchandise. Throughout the book, readers will be impressed with Robb's archival digging, especially as he turns to Ptolemy's 150 C.E. map of Britainnot just the source, but the fact that the author corrected the grid of Ptolemy's map, which was inaccurate. Readers will have fun following along with Robb's intriguing historical journey of discovery through this magical realm. In a series of appendices, the author provides detailed maps of different areas of the region as well as a timeline that runs from 43 C.E. to 1793.An imagination-stimulating work in which the past seems "to dissolve and reshape itself." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
An esteemed British biographer of such French literary figures as Balzac and Hugo, Robb moved from Oxford to northern England's border with Scotland and learned that the region had a deep history. The Debatable Land means not a place of disputation but, rather, deriving from batten (to fatten), a common grazing area for cattle and sheep. It was also a lair for reivers (thieves), whose anarchic antics were celebrated in local lore. The reivers were suppressed when England and Scotland partitioned the Debatable Land, in 1552, but the hilly, swampy, and river-riven area, which straddles the border, was an acknowledged buffer zone extending back to at least 1249, the date of a legal document defining its laws (no structures, no grazing after sunset). That these were described as ancient implies an even older history; Robb argues that the Debatable Land existed in Roman times and probably earlier. With a foray into the historical mystery of King Arthur, Robb's engaging geographical study will delight many, including fans of his previous venture into this genre, The Discovery of Middle Earth (2013).--Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In late 2010, Robb (The Ancient Paths) and his wife, Margaret Hambrick, moved to a remote part of northwest England, close to the Scottish border. Their new house was situated near a river that once formed the southern boundary of the Debatable Land, an area that historically acted as a buffer between England and Scotland, belonging to neither country. The area was renowned for the legendary, lawless Border reivers: the families whose marauders regularly conducted raids on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border in the 16th century. But who or what came before this history? Enchanted, Robb sets out to learn more, cycling throughout the Debatable Land and searching local archives. He discovers contradictions: while the Anglo-Scottish border had a reputation for lawlessness, the Debatable Land was actually governed by a "fully-developed.legal system" with a recognizable civil and criminal code. Recalculating the graticules of Ptolemy's early map helps Robb to uncover ancient, long-lost places, which leads him to suggest that the origins of the Debatable Land lie in Roman Britain. VERDICT With imagination and wit, Robb cogently brings the history of the region into sharp focus, satisfying all interested in British and Scottish history.-Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.