Name: The Steel Bonnets
ISBN: 9780007474288

George MacDonald Fraser

From the author of the famous ‘Flashman Papers’ and the ‘Private McAuslan’ stories.

The Steel Bonnets

Tim Pendry

This nearly fifty year old account of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands in the sixteenth century is still frequently reprinted for good reason and deserves re-reading today by anyone with an interest in organised crime and what we now call 'homeland security'. The author, a journalist, creator of the 'Flashman' series of popular novels, film script writer, former soldier and part-Anglo-Scot borderer himself, writes well and has an eye for a story so the book is generally a good read - although Fraser does not sacrifice fact to fiction. It tells the tale of the background to and the history of just over a century of state-sanctioned organised crime on the borderlands of two early modern states with a troubled history, a culture only brought to heel through the use of state terror when the two states were unified. Fraser is not averse to occasional contemporary and wider historical references to the late 1960s and early 1970s, likening the Anglo-Scottish border to the Afghan frontier and the mythologisation of brutality to the legend of the West in America. He holds no truck with the Scottish nationalist romanticisation of the border reivers (riders). The border ballads are often little more than the same sort of voyeuristic fascination of a laddish audience with tales ('ghosted autobiographies') of major criminals today. However, he is no moraliser while retaining his framework of values. He goes back to the roots of local organised crime, centred on criminal family networks, and finds them in the devastation to the economy left by brutal inter-state war and the inherent administrative incapacity of states. The century of criminality was not the normal state of the borders but was the result of borders being contested by only partially centralised polities. Men sent, or employed from within the borders, to manage affairs were frequently corrupted and part of the system themselves. Fifty years on, the book seems more pertinent than ever in understanding why the fringes of globalisation have resulted in blow-back in a world of improved communications. The borders rarely affected the core of England, sometimes Scotland, only because of weak communications. There are many case studies like this of what happens when emergent border areas are disrupted by war and the incapacity of states - Afghanistan frequently, Sicily, the Balkans and many others. The recent use of war as an instrument of policy by the West now appears all the more negligent. There is much factual meat in this case study to suggest that, while no historical situation ever precisely is reproduced elsewhere, themes and clues are ever-present in history. Destroy the capacity to rule in an area and it can only be restored through terror is one lesson. The point here is that, once a non-criminal economy is destroyed, a new economy based on illegality takes its place, whether raiding and brigandage, heroin production and distribution or trafficking in oil and antiquities, to displace farming and trade in goods and services. Illegality creates its own violent rules and codes of conduct but also its own economic and trading logic. Powerful interests quickly emerge who understand how the new system works, how to corrupt officials, how to use terror and how to create alliances. The modern West has one thing that Elizabeth I and the Stewarts did not, financial resources. The villains could not be bought off or bribed sufficiently, yet the West is now finding that trying to buy legality simply fuels more corruption and more warlordism. Perhaps only state terror is left. This is certainly relevant to modern Syria, Iraq and Libya where very weak states are trying to restore order against quasi-criminalised groups creating economies to match those created in Afghanistan or Colombia or Mexico or much of the rest of the emerging world. Western states want security and human rights but are finding that the purchase of the latter is becoming a bottomless pit just at the time when the homelands are craving some attention and disorder threatens in the cities and townships at the centre of empires. Having disrupted the world, the current belief is that the problem can be solved with fortress operations combined with overseas safe havens for migrants but this does nothing about the criminalised survival economy in which people are being forced to live. If the story of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands teaches a lesson, it might be a rather grim one. You either leave the bandits to fight it out and create their own warlord states (which is what IS is doing) or the matter can only be dealt with through full force directly or through proxies. By full force we may mean the inevitability of reigns of terror like that perpetrated in the first decade or so of the seventeenth century by James I of England and VI of Scotland who finally captured control of both sides of the border and then squeezed it hard. If he had not done so, one wonders, speculatively, if, having avoided becoming engaged in religious strife within Scotland and England in the previous century, some border political entrepreneurs might have discovered fundamentalist Protestantism or Catholicism as a tool for state creation. The book needs a bit of attention as it is read because (as Fraser acknowledges) the complexity of clan relationships and even of the system for law enforcement is, given the sources, rife with room for misunderstandings and errors. The same family names prop up time and time again. This is the story of clans with long histories of feud and violence, with patches or what London gangsters would call 'manors' and with ambiguous relationships to authority much like the sometimes symbiotic relationship in the past between organised crime and the Met. One major lack in the book is any serious reference to women in the borderlands. This is of its time but it is significant that, in a catalogue of killings (sometimes of women and children), arson and dispossession, there is no mention of rape. This also fits with a cultural model of organised crime. It is not that we want some feminist bleat about patriarchal society but we want to know more about how male criminality was sustained at home and how women played or failed to play a support function for clan operations. There are hints that women were important in this capacity as they are no doubt important in all such societies, fiercely loyal to the clan and perhaps a motive force for crime in demanding resources for the households they ran. Was there a culture of 'nagging' men to go and steal? Certainly marriage alliances between clans seem important although the transfer of a woman from one clan to another meant that her first duty (if I have interpreted the few references in the book correctly) was to her new husband and not to her father. Women may have been far from passive in this economy. Destroying households seems to have been as important as killing rivals to the clans. The theft of possessions was matched by burnings of houses, often carefully selected, and sometimes whole villages. Rivalries were existential. All in all, an interesting story closed with two appendices. The most magnificent curse from a Bishop against the reivers - a tirade of learned and vitriolic imprecation - and the misleading ballad of Kinmont Willie that warmed the hearts of border Scots nationalists. Which brings us to any futile attempt to tell the story of border organised crime as the story of competing nationalisms. It was nothing of the kind. People knew whether they were English and Scots but when it came to business, and this was business, they really did not care. The point of the border was that two forms of law applied and the Scots and English law enforcement authorities would co-operate only intermittently, warily and half-heartedly, aware that at any time, they might be at war again. This gave the reivers considerable opportunities for playing off one side against the other. English and Scots reivers raided each others' territories not because they were targeting Scots or English but because the other side was in a law enforcement zone from which they could escape profitably. In practice, Scots or English gangsters (for that is what they were) would strike up alliances with counterparts over the border to ensure safe passage, share in the spoils and use their influence on corrupt authorities to escape justice and get 'scot free'. Even when war came between London and Edinburgh, the competing armies could never rely on the borderers ostensibly on their side of the border. The criminal clans would pick and choose sides and alliances and sell their services according to interest and not sentiment. Local Scottish and English nationalism are later arrivals and probably derive precisely from the settlement of the border and its final demarcation as a division between nation states. The border ballads seem to be more examples of clan pride at doing over the English authorities than anything else. This is not to say that there was not anti-English or anti-Scottish sentiment but that this was probably to be found more clearly amongst the settled farmers most threatened by war perpetrated by the other side or by the criminal rackets and wanting central authority to be more active. The overwhelming impression given by this book is of a period of cynical lawlessness based on the profit motive and a dog-eat-dog world where the weak would soon go under, far from romantic and certainly terrible for the vast majority of ordinary people. When James I and VI comes into the region with the techniques of Mussolini, one finds oneself uncomfortably realising that the temporary tyranny and injustice was probably in the best interests of the majority of the people. The reivers did not use their freedoms kindly.

The Steel Bonnets

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