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If Scotland still exists
as a nation in her own right — and there are those who would deny it,
though they seldom last very long here — it is largely because of this
house and those who lived in it and defended it.
Whatever our political
convictions, most of us are deeply conscious of being another people in
another land, rather than Englishmen with a different accent who
occasionally like to wear fancy dress, eat barbarous foods and play
strange music. We have retained this awareness because, in the period
when States and their distinctive institutions were taking shape, this
country was quite separate and Scotsmen, if they travelled at all, knew
France and Holland better than England beyond the Tyne. When the Union
came, our character as a people was formed and our separate identity was
too well established simply to disappear.
The period when modern
nations were being formed and when their Parliaments, legal systems and
universities were slowly emerging, corresponds almost exactly to the
period when the Kerrs of Kersheugh and Ferniehirst lived in this house
or its predecessors and held their sector of the Border Line.
During that period, we
played no outstanding part in Scotland’s cultural development, which
was at times ahead of England’s, other than helping to compose a few
of the anonymous and collectively-produced ballads which are the Borders’
distinctive contribution to Scottish literature; but we played our part
in making it all possible, by providing the shield and the screen behind
which our nation grew. Without the Kerrs of Ferniehirst and — let us
be fair to them — our kinsmen of Cessford and our neighbours the
Scotts, Douglases, Elliots and the Homes, not to mention a whole host of
other Border "names" whose part in the nation’s defence,
though not as conspicuous, was just as real, there would be no Scotland.
There might have been a wild and untamed Caledonia beyond Loch Lomond
and the Tay, or an ever-diminishing Celtic Fringe like Welsh-speaking
Wales, but not a recognisable and recognised country, with a history and
an ethos of its own.
This is not the place to
give even a sketchy outline of Scotland’s story, or to discuss at
length what it means to be Scottish. Enough to say that there are many
important differences between this country and England, some of which
were more visible before the advent of the mass media than they are
today. One of these differences is that Scotland has long possessed
a large reservoir of educated men — perhaps more than she was able or
allowed to use. Their learning might not have gone very far by the time
they left school, but it had gone far enough for them to learn more,
given the motivation and the need.
Scotland was the first
country anywhere in the world to have a law making education compulsory
for anybody — in this instance the eldest sons of noblemen and
"principal heritors" (a category which included the Lairds of
Ferniehirst), enacted by the Scottish Parliament of 1496, and Jedburgh
itself was one of the first communities of any size to make it
compulsory for everybody — girls as well as boys — in 1628. The
First Education Act further required the sons of lords and lairds to
receive this education in a "grammar school" and not simply
from private tutors, the objects of the exercise being, in part, to get
them away from home and into a different environment where they might
grow more civilised and where the King could keep some sort of eye on
them. The idea thus emerged that the right place to get an education was
in fact a school and that boys, if not girls, of all social classes
should at least start together. whatever happened to them afterwards. It
is difficult to believe that such a measure could have been enacted in a
country wholly occupied with the struggle for survival as a country: but
we were there to look after this survival while others got on with the
business of living in such places as Edinburgh, Glasgow. Stirling, St.
Andrews and Aberdeen, where the general level of insecurity was no worse
than over most of Western Europe.
Linked with the general
spread of education — even if it was fairly rudimentary in most cases
— was the Scottish belief that "a man’s a man for a’
that". Robert Bums actually put it into words, but it had been
around for a great deal longer, certainly from the time when Ferniehirst
was one of Scotland’s major frontier fortresses, and probably even
earlier. It was a belief developed and entrenched through generations of
armed comradeship and through the way of life described by the
Elizabethan spies, Constable and Haugh. Lairds, house servants,
ploughmen and shepherds all felt themselves to be one family, and indeed
all were one family, because those who came to live and work here, and
many of those who simply offered their loyalty and accepted the
protection of our chiefs, took up the name of Kerr as a sign that they
belonged. Other families had a similar custom and it was the shared
surname, rather than a proven line of descent that gave each of them its
identity. Under those conditions, the ignominious phrase "the lower
orders", still used in England almost within living memory, had no
place here and still has none.
The "Burns
doctrine" did not of course imply that differences in rank and
wealth were non-existent or totally irrelevant, but that in the last
analysis they were of no great importance. What counted for him was the
common humanity of all mankind; what counted for us was that we stood,
rode and fought side by side; but the overall effect was much the same,
and the doctrine itself probably would not have evolved without the need
to defend ourselves and one another.
In more peaceful
surroundings, as in Central and Southern England, the "lord of the
manor", whether a peer, a knight or simply a landed gentleman,
lived in the "big house" and the peasants lived in their
cottages all the time. They came to the manor to work, to pay rent in
cash or kind, and to take part in the occasional feast, but it was still
another world to them, and increasingly so as the standard of living of
the upper class rose while that of the common people remained much the
same. Here the peasants — tenants rather than serfs — lived in their
cottages between raids, but frequently had to take refuge in
"peels" and castles such as Ferniehirst, then joined the laird
in a raid to replenish their livestock and built themselves another
cottage. It was a harder and more dangerous life but one that left less
scope for arrogance on one side and for envy on the other.
The raids and the
burnings are over, but this spirit is with us yet.
FOOTNOTES
1.An important
factor in this non-doctrinaire sense of social compatibility (equality
is perhaps too strong a word) was that every man had a horse. In
England, except in the English Borders where a similar spirit prevailed,
possession of a horse and ability to ride it was a status symbol. Here
it was a necessity of life. The world does not look or feel the same
from the saddle as it does when one’s feet are permanently fixed to
the ground. The laird would of course have a better horse than the
ploughman or the herd, and more of them, but the essential point was
that they were all mounted and all saw the world the way a horseman sees
it.
2.The last
word may be spoken by James Simpson the architect of the 1984
Restoration who says: "Ferniehirst is an unrivalled example of a
sixteenth century stronghold with a continuing story of occupation from
prehistoric times through Roman, Dark Age, Norman and Medieval until
today." |
