Episode 2 Border Country: The Story of Britain's Lost Middleland

1,900 years ago, Rome divided Britain with a wall.

That border has haunted us ever since.

At times, it has shattered communities

and plunged them into violent conflict.

But beneath the wall lies another land -

a symbol of unity, not division,

a land with its own unique customs and traditions -

the forgotten Middleland that once dominated the centre of Britain.

I'm drawn to border regions

and fascinated by what borders do to people and their societies.

I've walked across frontiers from Iran to Indonesia...

..and I've worked as part of diplomatic missions

in Iraq and the Balkans.

I've seen first-hand the terrible effect of borders on communities.

Now I want to unpick the history of our own border area

in the middle of Britain.

Nothing matters to me more than the story of this border.

I'm a Scottish man living on the English side of the border.

I'm the MP for the only constituency with border in its name.

And in September 2014, Scotland is going to vote on independence.

Now more than ever, we need to understand where this border

came from and remind ourselves that there is another story

buried in these mountains - the story of the Middleland.

This is Longtown auction mart,

perched on the border between England and Scotland.

Sheep have been bought and sold in this town for hundreds of years.

Border towns like Longtown

are the heart of what I call the Middleland -

the upland border country that stretches across the modern border

between England and Scotland, from the Highlands to the Humber.

These sheep have come from farmers from both sides

of the English-Scottish border.

They will have come from the sharp limestone ridges

around the Lake District and the Pennines,

from the round, border, upland hills.

And these are true border sheep.

It doesn't matter to the sheep

whether they're feeding on English or Scottish grass,

what matters is what price are you going to get in the market?

These are Texel crosses, these.

Let's get a hold of this lamb here. This little lamb here.

Chris Harrison has farmed sheep along the border all his life.

All right.

I was brought up on a hill farm, my father was a hill farmer

and my grandfather before that.

My grandmother was from Scotland, she was a Scot,

my grandfather's from Northumberland,

my wife's from Durham city,

I'm from Cumbria so I think I'm British.

I think sheep farmers are the same no matter where they live -

whether they live on one side of the border or the other,

most sheep farmers are exactly the same.

We both have the same interests,

we both have the same concerns and we both have the same complaints.

You've never felt like a Scottish sheep farmer

-is any different to an English sheep farmer?

-Not at all.

The Middleland has struggled for survival

ever since the Roman Emperor Hadrian

divided our island with a wall in the 2nd century.

At times, its unique culture has been crushed,

trampled by English and Scottish nationalism.

At others, the border has almost disappeared,

allowing a great Middleland culture to flourish.

Many scholars disagree with me,

but I see the central story of Britain in terms of the Middleland -

a story of a land and a people fighting for survival

in the shadow of the Roman wall.

The pinnacle of Middleland civilisation

was the great Anglian kingdom of Northumbria,

which dominated Britain in the 7th century.

At its height, it spanned from the Firth of Forth in the north,

to the Humber in the south.

Its kings ruled from places like Bamburgh,

near today's English-Scottish border.

Northumbria was one of the greatest Christian civilisations

that has ever existed.

Its saints and scholars, Cuthbert and Bede,

had a European-wide reputation.

Popes and emperors learned from the Middleland.

For over 200 years, Northumbria was the powerhouse of Britain.

But it was not to last.

In 793, Viking raiders attacked Northumbria.

They came without warning straight from the sea

and they shattered a civilisation.

The Royal Marines Commandos - focused, disciplined,

and terrifying sea-borne assault specialists -

are a good way today of understanding

what a Viking assault might have been like.

The amazing thing, being in this boat, is you get a sense

of what it must have been like to be a Viking.

You've got the spray in your face,

you've got the men ready to land on the beach -

you can see them shivering because it's unbelievably cold.

They would have travelled hundreds of miles from their homeland.

It's an unknown beach, an unknown language.

Is somebody waiting for you? How deep is the water going to be?

And are you going to make it back alive?

They hit the beach with total surprise, unbelievable speed.

And they were in amongst the population

before anyone knew they were there.

It must have been terrifying.

Cold, wet, coming onto a shore that they don't know,

about to do something that they're trained to do.

They're trained to fight but, actually,

they don't know what conditions they're going into.

How important do you think the element of surprise

-would have been to the Vikings?

-It would have been vital for them.

When it comes to doing a beach attack,

it comes to doing something like this, surprise is absolutely key.

You land when you're not expected, and actually,

landing at night is the best time of maintaining that surprise.

And, presumably, it is important that you know your beach,

you know your tides.

For us, we spend a lot of time looking at the beach conditions,

looking at where we're going.

We have a lot of equipment that enables us to do that.

I'm not convinced the Vikings had the same but they would have spent

some time attacking beaches year on year

and therefore got to know a little bit about the conditions,

but not as much as we know.

The Viking pirates targeted the great monasteries

at the heart of the Middleland civilisation.

For them, the churches or the libraries they were attacking

were places from which they were going to steal gold or treasure...

..or people.

But for the terrified population on the beach,

these ghostly figures, who could creep up almost every night,

must have seemed like demons from another world.

For the next 70 years, the Vikings raided again and again,

attacking suddenly different points on the west and east coast

and then, finally, in 866, a huge Viking army landed.

It marched on York.

The later Viking sagas remember them tearing out the lungs of the rulers

of the Middleland, spread-eagling them across their chest.

The kingdom of Northumbria lay in tatters.

Vikings spread across the Middleland,

and the kingdom of Northumbria

was pushed back to an area north of the River Tyne.

Over time, Vikings would form part of a new Middleland kingdom

that stretched from Dumbarton in modern day Scotland,

to the Lake District in England - the kingdom of Cumbria.

A century and a half after the first Viking raiders,

another wave of Viking farmers settled the inhospitable,

harsh, upland landscape that we now call the Lake District.

They appeared to focus on rocky terrain,

which had been avoided by the local population.

The Northumbrian Angles farmed on the rich lowland soil,

for them this must have seemed horrendous.

This is thin, bare, acidic -

very difficult to grow any crops here -

and yet this is the where the Vikings made their home.

The Vikings were able to pasture their sheep

and cattle on this unpromising soil

using techniques they brought from their homelands in Norway.

This helped create the upland farming culture we see today.

It's so difficult to get living connections to the Vikings

but I think here, actually, we may have got one.

Because this is a tree that I believe

was probably planted by the Vikings.

Look at it. It's got a very thick trunk and then,

when you climb into it, it's got this very distinctive spindly top

because it's been pollarded.

The Vikings cut this in order to feed green shoots to their cattle.

You can see trees like this right across the Norwegian fjords.

I just love it.

It's something where you feel the hack of the Viking axe,

a tree which the Vikings worshipped.

It's alive, living still, and connected to Viking lives.

The culture of these steep-sided valleys

has a parallel in modern Afghanistan.

In 2002, I walked through mountainous regions,

where each valley contained a new community

with a radically different identity.

Viking communities in the Lake District

may have lived a similar life,

in small fiefdoms bound in by the steep fells on either side.

Dry-stone waller Steve Allen lives 13 miles from my home.

These dry stone walls are a defining feature of the Middleland,

crisscrossing the land on both sides of the border.

So, what are we up to here? What's this?

We're repairing a gap to keep the sheep on the fell.

That's a typical sort of wall repair we're doing today.

-Can you look for one?

-Oh, lord. OK, how about this one?

-Go on, then. How about that?

-That's a bit too tall.

-You don't like that?

-Might go in. Will have to go in like that.

-Is that all right?

-I don't like doing that.

It's called a soldier, that one, where they're longer...

What's it called?

Soldiers, when they're stood up straight like a soldier.

-And you don't like them?

-Not really, no, it'll do.

-What's wrong with them?

It doesn't quite look right to me, but anyway...

Tell us, how much of a stone wall can you build in a day?

Normally the walls around here are about 4ft 6 high,

one man can build 4m a day quite easily.

And if you build it well, how long will it last?

It will last 150-200 years. Yeah.

So it could be there for hundreds of years.

This stone could be used in another 1,000 years.

Do you feel sometimes,

a connection with the people from the past who built them?

I can appreciate all the hard work and all the labour

that's gone into somebody that's made a wall originally.

We're using the same materials, built in the same way.

So, yeah, it's not a bad life, being a dry-stone waller.

Do you think you'd like to take it up?

Viking settlers didn't only change the landscape,

they also changed the language.

Words derived from Norse are still used across the Middleland,

on both sides of today's border.

We can see the history of the way the Vikings farmed

in the place names.

Down there in the valley bottom was a man called Ulf, Ulf's vatn -

what we call Ullswater.

And we can see his thwaite,

the place name for where he kept his horses.

We can see also this place.

This valley is called Grizedale from the Viking word "grize" for pigs.

They gave us the names not just for the fells and the becks

but even the rocks, the crags, the scars.

The souls of the Vikings are trapped in the names of the Lake District.

The kingdom of Cumbria became a unique fusion

of the ancient Celtic culture, that had existed before Roman times,

and the newly-arrived Viking settlers.

Few artefacts remain from this time,

but hidden away in a small churchyard in Penrith

on the edge of the Lake District,

is a fascinating grave which shows the way in which the Middleland

had the capacity to combine diverse cultures.

This is something really amazing.

You'd never find anything like it in the south of England

or the north of Scotland.

These are unique things called hogback tombs.

It really, to be honest, should be in a museum

but I quite like the fact that actually it's out here

and it's been here for 1,000 years, gathering moss and lichen

so much so that you can barely see what it once was.

But look carefully and these sinuous lines are the tail of a serpent,

a Viking serpent.

What's it doing? Is it chewing its tail?

Is it at the root of a sacred tree?

We don't know, but what we do know is that this is a serpent

that has its roots in Viking pagan mythology.

But if you look at either end of his tomb

you can see there are Christian crosses.

So, a man with a Viking background, who's also a Christian.

The kingdom of Cumbria, with its unique culture,

would be the last truly independent kingdom of the Middleland.

By the middle of the 10th century, it was being squeezed

by increasingly powerful and aggressive neighbours.

To the south, England was forming as the kingdom of Wessex expanded.

To the north, the kingdoms of Picts and Scots were fusing together,

forming Scotland.

We know very little about the end of this last Middleland kingdom

but there is a legend that its final ruler,

King Dunmail, is buried here,

at the mountain pass of Dunmail Raise in the Lake District.

Historian Fiona Edmonds, from Cambridge University,

helped me understand the traditional legend.

This is the cairn of Dunmail Raise and the cairn,

according to tradition,

was raised over the body of Dunmail, the last king of Cumbria.

This is amazing. And they seem to have even run the road

on either side of it to show their respect for the cairn.

There is a strong tradition about a battle here.

Dunmail lost the battle and was slain and was buried here.

And his crown was taken to Grizedale Tarn and thrown in.

-We should go and look at the tarn.

-Indeed.

Dunmail's kingdom would have been defined

by this kind of landscape - a patchwork of high mountain passes

and hidden valleys whose scattered communities must have been

very difficult for English or Scottish invaders to control.

According to the legend, Dunmail finally fought and lost

an important battle in these hills.

Ah, there we are. So, this...this is it.

So, according to legend, after the battle and the death of Dunmail,

his crown was brought here, thrown into the tarn

and one day the crown will be retrieved

and the kingdom will rise again.

It's interesting, when we look at this lake,

that the legend of the lake is a legend of people

romantically imagining a kingdom coming back.

It's a bit like Arthur.

It's a legend of if the crown can come out again,

the Cumbrian king will come back

and the Cumbrian kingdom will emerge again.

Yeah, there are certainly Arthurian resonances to that tradition

but there is a kernel of truth,

in that we know that the kingdom was under pressure

from the Scots and the English.

Apparently what happened was that the English king, Edmund,

came and ravaged the area and then granted it to Mael Coluim,

or Malcolm, King of Scots.

So, already there you can see a deal being done

between the Scottish and the English King.

Whatever the truth of the legend, historians do know

that by the close of the 10th century, Dunmail was dead

and by the middle of the 11th century

the kingdom of Cumbria had faded away.

The world is scattered with lost identities, lost countries,

lost people, forgotten ethnicities.

So this, in Cumbria, is part of a whole bundle.

You can find them in Afghanistan,

in kingdoms on the edge of Kashmir, in the Balkans.

Cumbria was one of those places.

A place that would have felt rich, powerful, strong -

a kingdom - and would never have imagined that, as time went on,

it would be forgotten and become only a legend in a lake.

The kingdoms of the Middleland may have gone,

but its culture survived, still quite distinct

from the Highlands of Scotland or the Lowlands of southern England.

The people of the Middleland still spoke the same patchwork

of languages and even preserved their own legal codes.

This distinct culture would be violently challenged

by a new force which struck Britain in 1066.

The Norman invader, William the Conqueror,

saw the independent-minded Middleland as a rebellious area

and a potential threat to his regime.

He was determined to neutralise it.

In the winter of 1070, William's men swept across the Middleland,

bringing death and destruction from York to Durham

in what would be known as the Harrying of the North.

100,000 people died.

William's soldiers burned the villages, they destroyed the ploughs

so the crops could not be planted for the following year,

they piled the grain and cattle and burned them too.

And, according to the same contemporary chronicler,

people fed on horse, on cat and even human flesh.

And the only thing seen moving through the deserted villages

of the Middleland, were wild dogs and wolves

feeding on the bodies of the dead.

The devastation of the 11th century Middleland was so brutal

that even William's biographer was moved to write...

.."When I think of helpless children,

"young men in the primes of life,

"and hoary greybeards perishing alike of hunger,

"I am so moved to pity that I would rather lament the grief

"and sufferings of the wretched people

"than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy."

The Harrying of the North reminds me

of the Marsh Arab region of southern Iraq,

where I served as a deputy governor in 2003 and 2004.

Saddam Hussein saw the autonomous,

independent-minded Marsh Arabs as a threat,

and he wiped out their culture -

draining the marshes on which they lived,

laying mines and bombing them

until their land was as empty as the Middleland.

The Scottish king came for the survivors,

and for decades afterwards it was said that every Scottish home,

even the poorest, had a slave from these northern lands.

In William the Conqueror's Domesday Book,

much of the north-east of England is simply described as a wasteland.

And as for the old kingdom of Cumbria, it's not even mentioned.

By the end of the 11th century, much of the Middleland was a wilderness.

The rapidly growing kingdoms to its north and south

handed this stricken landscape over to religious communities.

The monks, arriving here in the century that followed,

carried with them from continental Europe the seeds

of a great renaissance for the Middleland.

For these monks it didn't matter where the kingdom of Scotland ended

and the kingdom of England began.

They were building their own kingdom of God.

Drawing on the inspiration of 7th-century Middleland saints,

like Cuthbert and Bede, they built dozens of monasteries,

and began to transform the landscape.

One of these monasteries was Dryburgh Abbey,

20 miles north of the border in modern-day Scotland.

There are still Cistercian monks living in the Middleland.

Barry Dougan lives and works at nearby Nunraw Abbey.

So, could you give us a sense of the rhythm of a monk's day?

Well, the monk's day starts...

It would start very early in the morning, while it was still dark.

So, in the Middle Ages, I believe at about 2:00am or 2:30am.

Today we rise at 3:15am,

go straight to the church for the first service of the day,

which is the Office of Vigils which begins at 3:30am.

The rest of the morning and in the afternoon

you would then go to your work.

Do you think there are parts of your life

which a 12th-century monk would still recognise?

Well, a monastery today, it's not a medieval theme park.

The first Cistercians had very high ideals

and a great emphasis on simplicity and manual work.

And still today we have the same emphasis,

so that there are working periods during the day,

in the morning and the afternoon.

There are all the daily tasks and departments -

the laundry, cleaning, administration.

-Is it hard? Is it a tough thing?

-It can be hard and austere.

There's a wee story from the Middle Ages

that illustrates Cistercian life.

There's a brother who's ploughing all day and he's tired and he's hungry

and suddenly he has a vision of Christ ploughing with him.

And that story illustrates that outwardly,

Cistercian life can be hard and austere

but inwardly it can be filled with the sense of the presence of God.

The industry and skill of the monks

transformed the culture and economy across the Middleland.

The 12th-century monks were an amazing gift to this area

because they didn't just pray, they were like modern aid workers.

They brought health, education,

they transformed the landscape.

They drained the soil, introduced new agricultural techniques

and they took small local farms

and they transformed them into a global business.

In just two generations, the monks improved the land so much

that parts of the Middleland were transformed

into some of the best grazing land in Britain.

The vigorous trade at Longtown has its roots in this monastic past.

One of the most extraordinary things the monks did was this -

they took local sheep farming

and they made it into a vast international trade.

One monastery alone could move 20,000 sheep a year,

more than this entire auction market sells in a day.

AUCTIONEER CALLS

With their close ties to monasteries across Europe,

the monks had direct access to the international trade in wool.

The economy of the Middleland boomed

and the people counted their wealth in sheep.

As the Middleland became fertile and prosperous,

the region now became attractive to the English and Scottish kings,

who quarrelled over where one kingdom began and the other ended.

By the middle of the 13th century, a rough line had been drawn

between the two kingdoms a few miles north of Hadrian's Wall.

But this was not yet a true border.

The people living along it wouldn't have defined themselves

primarily as Scottish or English.

Everyone spoke the same dialect of English

and many people owned land on both sides of the line.

But in 1272 a new English king came to power,

whose personal ambition would devastate the Middleland.

The military frontier, which had been dormant since Roman times,

was about to return.

By this time, England was no longer seen by other countries

as an impoverished barbarian fringe of Europe.

Under Edward I it had become a superpower.

Edward I was a king on an epic scale.

Strong, tall, a man who had made his reputation in Syria

killing an assassin in his tent with his bare hands.

But, above all, he was a king with extraordinary ambition.

Edward's government moved around England

but his most important seat of power

was here, at the Palace of Westminster.

The Palace of Westminster has been at the heart

of English government for 900 years.

It was here that Edward feasted, held his councils,

condemned his enemies to death.

And it was from here that he created the institutions of Parliament,

of law and administration that survived almost unchanged

until the 19th century.

He had created a centralised, ultra-modern machine.

Edward didn't want to be a king

confined just to the borders of England,

he felt he had a right to much more.

First he conquered Wales, then he set his sights on Scotland.

He was determined to be the overlord of the whole of Britain.

And Edward might have succeeded,

had his towering ambition not come up against formidable opposition.

Edward's famous antagonist, Robert the Bruce,

has become a symbol of Scottish nationalism.

But he wasn't a Highland clansman, he was a noble from the Middleland.

He was a man who was a symbol of the Middleland.

The family land holdings stretched all the way from southern Scotland

down to the edge of Yorkshire.

He spoke Norman French.

He had far more in common with English and French aristocrats

than he did with ordinary people on either side of the border.

Bruce's struggle against Edward

appeared to have been motivated not so much by nationalism

as by a desire to protect his own family's power.

The barons of the Middleland paid taxes nominally to both English

and Scottish crowns but they were largely left alone to conduct

their own affairs and it was this autonomy that was now under threat.

Bruce's family interests

included the English royal fortress of Carlisle castle.

Professor Dauvit Broun from Glasgow University

explained to me why Bruce and other Scottish barons

were threatened by Edward's rule.

Well, I think the crucial thing is the way the countries were governed.

England has become the most centralised state in western Europe.

This is good if you're the king

and if you're people on the make to be his ministers.

It's not good if you're a baron or a regional magnate

or somebody in the elite with serious interests in Scotland.

The last thing you want is for that to be all swallowed up

and become part of England.

So, Edward I, what does he get wrong about this whole situation?

He knew these people very well.

He may have reckoned that they would be happy enough

to knuckle under to his overlordship.

So he knows them well.

He wouldn't have committed himself to this campaign

if he thought he was going to lose.

So, if you'd asked him, "Why do you think you can pull this off?"

He got his way through playing his political cards brilliantly,

I mean, he was superbly effective there.

I think he would have been confident because of sheer military muscle.

With Edward as overlord, the future for Bruce looked bleak.

A humiliating life as Edward's vassal

within a centralised state in which power was wielded from London.

In the end he broke free. It was a huge risk.

He risked his family, his life, his lands

but he could not bear English rule.

And he had himself crowned King of Scotland.

The war between the two rival kingdoms,

that had been raging for a decade, now escalated.

The culture and prosperity of the Middleland,

painstakingly built by the monks over 200 years, was shattered.

Robert the Bruce sent these raids deep into English territory,

burning abbeys, destroying fields, chopping down the fruit trees

so people couldn't feed themselves, and the English responded in turn.

It was a welter of destruction and horror

which hadn't been seen in more than 200 years,

since William the Conqueror harried the north.

The border between England and Scotland now sprang into life

a few miles north of the old Roman frontier.

It was brutally enforced by the authorities on both sides.

For the first time in their history, the people of the Middleland

had to finally throw in their lot with one side or the other.

You had to choose - were you English or Scottish?

It was illegal for a Scotsman to marry an Englishwoman.

And without written permission,

it was forbidden for an Englishman to cross into Scotland.

The bloody conflict between England and Scotland had reopened the scar

inflicted by the Romans over 1,000 years before.

The building of Hadrian's Wall had created a military frontier

which had defined the character of the Middleland for centuries.

And now that frontier was back.

War devastated the local economy.

Deprived of their livelihoods, the farmers of the Middleland

were drawn into a world of mafia bosses and cross-border raids.

It reminds me of the North-West Frontier

of Afghanistan and Pakistan -

there too an arbitrary line was drawn on a map

by English and Scottish officers,

there too that border created a corridor for invading armies,

a place of bandits and spies -

one of the most dangerous places on earth.

The North-West Frontier is still a place

where superpowers vie for control, flushed with weapons

and dominated by smugglers and warlords.

There was one section of the Anglo-Scottish border

that was more violent and contested than any other.

This is like a lost fragment of the Middleland.

It was forgotten as England and Scotland was forming.

40 square miles of territory that didn't belong to anyone.

This was the Debatable Land,

a place that neither England nor Scotland controlled.

A nest of the most violent bandits.

A no-man's land.

The area became so dangerous, you could either live in a mud hut -

which you could build again in a day -

or you constructed a building like this.

This tower near the Scottish village of Canonbie, in the Debatable Land,

was one of hundreds built across the borderlands.

They were watch towers and defensive fortresses

with walls up to 2m thick.

In the south of England castles were grand palaces

but here fortified buildings like this

were scattered in their thousands through the landscape. Why?

Because on any night,

armed men could explode through your courtyard.

God help you. They'd take everything they could carry - pots and pans,

even children's clothes, and then they'd ride off into the night

with all your cattle and your provisions for the winter.

It must have been terrifying, knowing that if they broke through

they could kidnap your six-year-old son

or, if they set the building alight, you could be burnt alive.

If you managed to make it up here,

you could light a beacon and hold out long enough

for your relatives to come galloping over the hills to rescue you

and then the whole game's reversed -

you're racing to catch the people who've attacked you.

They are cutting back and forth on hidden routes in the wilderness,

through the mosses,

trying to make it back to the safety of their own peel tower.

Imagine the society and economy that emerged from a life like this.

This was a place which was a failed state.

There was nothing that we would recognise as the rule of law,

no security.

It was a place where protection money was taken

just not to attack your neighbour.

It was a place where the word blackmail was invented.

A mafia society where the only honour

was honour amongst thieves and the greatest heroes were those thieves.

For the mafia godfathers it must have been glorious -

a place of courage and honour and excitement.

For everyone else, a living hell.

And there was a name for these people - the reivers.

The reiver, who's believed to have owned the peel tower here,

was one of the most famous.

Johnnie Armstrong of the cross-border Armstrong clan

led a band of violent reivers who were all experts

in cattle theft, extortion and hostage taking.

Over generations, bandits like Johnnie

become heroes of the border area and acquired legendary status.

The reivers didn't only thrive in the Debatable Land,

the violence engulfed the entire border region.

You can still sense the souls of these outlaws

in the wild land which they dominated.

This is Tarras Moss on the Scottish side of the border,

familiar territory for Johnnie Armstrong

and fellow bandits like the English reiver Hobbie Noble.

Farmer Duncan Telford's family

have lived near Hobbie Noble's land for generations.

Hobbie Noble was the most famous reiver from the Bewcastle area.

He was pinching off his own neighbours on the English side.

He got kicked out of England

and came and lived with the Scottish raiders.

So he was like a famous outlaw, really, like a Wild West figure.

Aye, yes, yes, aye. Not to be messed with.

-It's great weather you've got round here.

-Aye, this is typical.

This would be Armstrongs, Elliots, Scotts,

these sort of families, around here?

Ah, yes. There'd be a lot of Armstrongs,

there'd be Armstrongs on the English side and the Scots side.

Johnnie Armstrong was one of these legendary figures.

Oh, aye. He went to meet the King of Scotland

with 40 of his followers and they couldn't make much on him

so they hung him and his 40 followers on the spot.

Caerlanrig up there, aye.

-That's a terrible thing.

-Well, they must have been naughty boys!

Duncan, you've got a reiving tattoo and your child is called Reeve.

Yeah, me son's called Reeve, aye.

It's not got an I in it, like. It's RE-EV-E. Yeah.

And is there something that appeals to you about that?

Is it something that you like about the reivers,

that attracted you to them?

It's cos they were the same as me, farmers from the same place,

same job so there's similarities.

Do you think if you'd been living then you would have been a reiver?

Definitely. Aye. You wouldn't have a choice.

And do you think you would have been good at it or enjoyed it?

I would say so, aye. What do you think?

The border was designed to separate people into two countries

but in fact it created a shared identity.

The Armstrongs and Elliots on this side of the border

absolutely no different from Hobbie Noble's family,

or the Grahams, on the English side of the border.

They robbed each other but they wore the same clothes,

they rode the same horses,

they sang the same ballads about their exploits.

These ballads are still performed here in Liddesdale.

FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

# He has sent it to Johnnie Armstrong

# To come and speak with him speedily..."

Locals still argue about what happened here over 400 years ago.

Most of the history that's known about the execution

of Johnnie Armstrong actually comes from the ballad.

"The King to send down to sort them out."

There's only one way to sort them out is hang them,

and hang all his men and all with him.

Simple as that, I would think.

But who was the bigger villain?

The king. The government.

THEY LAUGH

It's very tempting to think of the borderers,

because of all this violence and mayhem,

as though they're intrinsically warrior people,

as though it's about ethnic hatred,

as though they're intrinsically hard men.

This is something people used to say during the Balkan wars,

it's something that I've heard in Afghanistan.

Now, Afghanistan is warrior tribal society but it's not true,

not true of any of those people

because, in the end, these societies are victims of proxy wars.

They're caught between two neighbouring states

who are exploiting them for their own ends.

This was a war that began with Hadrian's Wall

and these communities were wracked

on the dividing point between two nations.

By the 16th century, the border area had been divided

into six separate regions stretching 50 miles north

and south of the border.

They were called the Marches.

Each march was governed by a warden

whose job was to try and keep the peace

and bring reivers like Johnnie Armstrong to justice.

During Armstrong's time,

the English warden of the western march lived here at Naworth Castle

on the English side of the border.

His name was Thomas Dacre.

Right. HE GROANS

Now, this is the top of the castle, virtually.

A few bits of Roman wall stone down here

and a great view of Jockland over there.

Philip Howard is directly descended from Thomas Dacre.

-And your ancestors built this castle?

-That bit there, 1335.

Around about 1500, the most famous of the Dacres, Thomas Dacre,

he built all of this and he built the great hall and everything

and he was Warden of the Western March.

What did a Warden of the Western March do?

He was meant to protect this area.

To protect the people here and to keep law and order.

We had the high rights and the low rights.

The high rights, as can be seen on our hanging tree,

was to hang Armstrongs, where Lord William happily hung 63

in two years, which was a thing.

There's another tree, we think, somewhere else,

which sadly fell down, where my father always promised me

we hung 46 members of the Hay family, which was another good day.

And the low rights were to incarcerate.

We had... Sadly that wing got burnt down

but we've got a dungeon and a pit,

but there were seven separate dungeons right the way through

for us to maintain law and order and there was a lot of it to maintain.

And are there still a lot of Armstrongs around?

Unfortunately so. We did our best.

Actually, three of them actually work with us at the moment,

and Bells and Ridleys and Stewarts.

And so I think we're a little bit friendlier now.

What sort of man do you think he was?

What was his personality?

He was a tough man. He would have been a tough man.

Dacre, all of those guys must have been brutal,

duplicitous, cruel, hard men.

You were looking at a time

where it was like his own fiefdom he was running.

He answered to the King but actually he didn't, he answered to no-one.

He was in charge of life and death.

Thomas Dacre made his name at the Battle of Flodden in 1513,

where the Scottish king was killed by English forces.

And because I'm a Scot, Philip likes to remind me

of this fact at every possible opportunity.

These seem to be an extraordinary pair of boots that you've produced.

Yeah, well, I thought I'd get a few exciting things to have a look at.

There's some moss-trooper's boots,

which are probably meant to be genuine moss-trooper's boots.

So these are, what, 400 or 500 years old?

Tromping through the mosses of Cumbria and Scotland.

You'd need to be a strong man to wear those things, wouldn't you?

-And the sword?

-Well, it is said this blade came from the Battle of Flodden

where, of course, the Howards and Dacres

commanding the army inflicted a catastrophic defeat

on the Scottish nation, which I think you're aware of.

So much so that actually, after the Battle of Flodden,

Henry VIII, in grateful thanks,

allowed my ancestor to put on his Howard coat-of-arms

the Scottish Lion, which actually, if you look,

has its legs and bits chopped off and has an arrow through its throat.

And, apparently, if we go into Scotland,

which obviously we don't often,

we are meant to be allowed to wear a black tartan

because of the killing of the Scottish king.

-Philip, thank you.

-It's been a pleasure.

Despite the brutality and determination

of men like Thomas Dacre,

the chaos and anarchy in the Middleland continued.

The English and Scottish authorities

decided they couldn't hope to restore law and order

until a clear border had been agreed

across the entire length of their kingdoms.

The dispute over who controlled the Debatable Land had to be resolved.

It was finally divided in 1552...

..when the English and Scots, after centuries of fighting,

got in a French ambassador who drew a straight line on a map.

And it's this - it becomes an earth bank running for miles.

Finally, it's possible to have a nationality.

My cows are English, my sheep are Scottish.

My brother is English, I am Scottish.

This was the moment at which the kingdoms were finalised

and it's still the border today.

In the end, becoming English or Scottish comes down to this.

Now I'm a Scot... and now I'm an Englishman.

With the border defined from coast to coast,

there was now pressure to reinforce that division.

And the final end of all the conflict and war

between England and Scotland is a proposal

that lands on Queen Elizabeth I's desk to build an 80-mile wall

from sea to sea with towers and ramparts to keep out the Scots.

Over 1,000 years after the Romans had deserted Hadrian's Wall,

the idea of a physical border had returned.

Dozens of small forts would be linked by parapets and ramparts

20ft wide and 40ft high.

Huge ditches would be dug on the Scottish side,

up to 60ft wide.

While on the English side, a complex system of half-moon ditches

and trenches was proposed.

The fortifications were immense but the Queen was assured

that the proposal would only cost a mere £30,000 -

a few million today.

Fortunately the idea was dumped and the wall was never built.

But this is exactly where that great wall would have been.

The English may not have built their wall

but as the end of the 16th century approached,

the Middleland was still divided in two and the lawlessness

and criminality continued across the entire border area.

The late 1500s finished with an explosion of violence.

Here in Carlisle Castle, one of the Scottish leaders even managed

to break loose a notorious bandit, Kinmont Willie,

right under the nose of the English wardens.

Kinmont Willie had terrorised the border community for decades,

at times it's even possible he was being used as an agent

or spy for the Scottish authorities.

But when Queen Elizabeth I of England died

and was succeeded by King James of Scotland in 1603,

uniting Scotland and England,

Kinmont's career was effectively over.

So long as there's a border, you can never really have security because

everything's caught up in the war between England and Scotland.

So you try to arrest a bandit and immediately

someone comes along and says they've got to be released because

they're being used as a spy or to do a raid against the Scottish crown.

But once the border's gone and the war's finished,

then these bandits are no longer necessary,

governments no longer get involved.

They've ceased to be useful.

These guys clanking around with their old swords

have just become an embarrassment.

Kinmont Willie's last appearance

was when he rode up to Carlisle with a few of his friends,

drunk out of his mind,

burnt a few outbuildings then he rode up to the gates

of the castle itself and hammered on the gates,

shouting out some old, half-remembered border war cry.

But no-one cared.

They hardly even noticed.

Men who had once been useful allies were now hanged,

entire clans were deported.

The age of the reivers was now over.

Without the tension of the frontier,

farming, trade and prosperity flourished again.

The border became irrelevant.

This was the vision of King James when he became no longer

just King of Scotland and England but the King of Britain.

He insisted the names of the countries would go,

they would be called North Britain and South Britain

and instead of the border there was going to be a Middleshire.

With the Union Of The Crowns in 1603,

Britain had been brought under the control of one monarch.

Just over 100 years later, our two parliaments became one.

The Middleland became again the centre of a renaissance.

Its writers - Wordsworth and Walter Scott -

immortalised its landscape and history

and inspired the whole of Europe.

There is still a border in the Middleland but it has become

a subtle encounter between very closely related cultures.

In September 2014, Scotland will vote on independence

and the possibility of an international boundary will return,

opening a new chapter in the history of the Middleland.

The story hasn't ended.

We still don't know whether we're going to have a Middleland -

a unified, upland culture stretching almost from Edinburgh to the Humber

or whether the Romans will win through -

that harsh, artificial line,

that border that divided nations and pitted them against each other.

2,000 years have passed and we still don't know

which of those two principles

is going to define Britain for the future.