"Detestabil Enormities"

By Charles Elliott

THE STEEL BONNETS

by GEORGE MacDONALD FRASER

395 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

The land itself, in the words of an old chronicler, was "lean, hungry and waste." Instead of houses and barns, sinister cut-stone towers studded bleak slopes, along with no less sinister place names--Foul Play Know, Dour Hill, Blackhaggs, Foulmire Heights. Here on the border between England and Scotland, year after terrible year, the great "riding families"--Armstrongs, Scotts, Maxwells, Grahams, Johnstones, Elliots, Fenwicks and others--spent most of their time committing "innumerabil slauchteris, fyre raisingis, herschipps and detestabil enormities."

In fact, thanks to the enterprise of the reivers, as such hereditary brigands were known, between the battle of Flodden in 1513 and the English crackdown on Scotland after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the border was probably the most troubled region on the face of the much troubled earth.

Fraser, an Englishman schooled in Scotland, makes a bold attempt to bring some order into the historical melee. He has no difficulty showing that patriotism had little to do with it all. Scots preyed upon English and were preyed upon, but at the same time they feuded among themselves. The border served mainly to complicate the job of law officers and make escape easier.

In the worst districts, armed robbery eventually took the place of all peace time occupations. The classic reiver anecdote has Auld Wat Scott of Harden being served a pair of spurs in a covered dish by his wife--a hint that the larder was bare and that he had better go rustle a few cows. (Auld Wat is also credited with a memorable remark to a haystack, which he noticed while returning from a raid: "Aye, if ye had four legs ye wouldna stand there lang.")

Fraser is so far best known as the spoofing inventor of Henry Paget Flashman (Flashman, 1969, and Royal Flash, 1970), the compleat bounder. He thus comes to the reivers with an acute understanding of unsporting behavior. It stands him in excellent stead. After Henry VIII defeated the Scots at Solway Moss in 1542, for example, the fleeing survivors were held for ransom by their own border countrymen.

There are frequent gleams of rough heroism in the murk of violence. Though Eraser's outlaws are notably grubbier, they are still recognizably the same men immortalized in border ballads like Johnnie Armstrang, Kinmont Willie and The Douglas Tragedy. If the clangor of their combat has been long silenced, it nevertheless has some unexpected contemporary resonances. Living at the heart of Liddesdale, the most intractable part of the whole border, and numbered among the toughest of all the reivers was a family named Nixon. . Charles Elliott

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