The Steel Bonnets (Common Reader Editions)

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Summary: Back-stabbing,double-crossing,treacherous,thieving..........
Review: barbarous,murderous,anarchic, happenings on the Anglo-Scottish borderlands from the 13th through 16th centuries. It was Afghanistan with kilts.

Rating:
Summary: Clear and precise history that clarifies border history
Review: Fraser has completed a difficult task in this book. He brings his novelist sensibilities for the reader to the task of clarifying one of the more difficult and confusing periods in Anglo-Scottish history. It is highly readable and full of primary source material that enriches the read. He also includes detailed history of the various reivers families - a fascinating read for those who family roots are in the Border.

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Summary: How Do You (Not) Spell "Elliott"?
Review: In this wonderful look at a dark and fascinating period in Anglo-Scottish history, Fraser brings the same quirky attitude and deep appreciation of man's inherent rascality that make the "Flashman" books and his novel "Mr American" (q.v.) so iminently readable to the explication of the complex and violent history of the Border reivers.

Beginning with a Foreword that, among other things, describes the jolt he got watching Richard Nixon's Inauguration on television, when he saw Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham standing together on the platform, he explains, in typical fashion, that Johnson, Nixon and Graham are all names that figured strongly in the reiving years, and thateach, as well, wore faces that might well still be seen in the Border country today.

He delves into the history of Hadrian's Wall ("Any Englishman can tell you why it was built -- 'To keep the Scots out!'"), and speculates how Anglo-Scottish history might have been changed were the Wall a few milse north or south.

And then he dives off into the history of the Border and the Reivers.

This is *not* a standard, dry history text, laying everything out in a straight line,with dates and battles to memorise and all the juice sucked out of it.

No, Fraser skips around; first giving us an outline of the whole period, he then, in subsequent chapters, cover different aspects of the history in depth, and not necessarily chronologically.

He gives us fascinating details, such as why the spiral stairs in the watch towers built by the Kerr family tended to spiral anti-clockwise instead of the usual clockwise, in the process defining and explaining the origin of the term "correy fisted".

He writes of the great feuds among the reiving families, many of whom were to be found on both sides of the Border, of the practise of blackmail (somewhat different than the meaning the term has today) and in what manner one might legally pursue raiders back across the Border to attempt to retrieve one's property.

Explaining the administrative setup of the Border, he describes the careers and personalities of several of the more prominent Border Wardens, lawmen assigned by both England and Scotland to keep the peace, but never given the budgets or forces they needed.

He introduces us to several of the prominent reivers, including some of Sir Walter Scott's ancestors, and recounts their deeds.

He analyses the economy of the Border and the reiving system, as well as anyone can, at this remove and from extant records, and shows howthis all affected the overall history ofAnglo-Scottish relations.

And, for good measure, he includes the truly "Monition of Cursing" issued by the Archbishop of Glasgow against the reivers, a masterful piece of vituperation that runs four or more full pages depending on the edition.

Not a history text in the classic sense, not a novel, because it's all true, Fraser has presented the reader with a corking good reading experience that opens the window on another time and place whose influences still reverberate in the world today.

((About the spelling of Eliot... or Ellet ... or Eliott...: The family seemed to not mind how their name was spelt -- Fraser lists a large number of variant spellings with various permutations of "L"s and "T"s. He then points out that almost any were acceptable -- *except*, for some reason, the double "L" and double "T", a spelling the family affected, for some reason, to despise...))

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating look at a fascinating period
Review: Infectiously well written like all Fraser, this look at the Border Reivers is full of quirky, anecdotal history of the region and the period. Fraser writes almost conversationally in this book, which is a nice change from drier, more academic histories. The only problem here is a slight lack of narrative line -- at times, the book jumps from subject to subject a little too randomly. But this is a minor flaw.

While a wonderful book in its own right, Fraser's work also sheds some interesting light on David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed." That work examines the four major waves of English immigration to the new world. The fourth and final wave comes from among the region and people Fraser describes so well.

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Summary: Makes the Balkans look like a children's sandbox
Review: THE STEEL BONNETS by George MacDonald Fraser is a prodigious and esoteric historical narrative about the Anglo-Scottish border. The time is the 16th century. The place and players are indicated by the book's subtitle, "The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers", reivers being raiders. The place is more specifically the six administrative areas called Marches (3 English and 3 Scottish - West, Middle, and East on each side of the line) which straddled the border to serve as a buffer zone.

Having grown up in Carlisle, the former bastion of the English West March, Fraser has written a work of love divided into five parts. In the first three, Fraser describes the genesis of the Border Marches, the Wardens, one per March, that were responsible for the maintenance of order, the raider families that lived there, and the culture and practice of violence that characterized the area. The author's catalog of depredations, based on research of contemporary records, includes murder, arson, blackmail, kidnapping, rustling, racketeering, feuding, plunder, and banditry - all made infinitely worse by the indifference and/or cynical scheming of the English and Scottish central governments which tolerated the not-infrequent participation in the mayhem by the Wardens themselves. Part 4 is a sequential narrative history of events along the Border during the 16th century, the last before James VI of Scotland united the island's thrones as James I of Great Britain. Part 5 describes this monarch's brutal suppression of both the violence and raider families of the Marches during the first decade of the 17th century, an effort that finally brought peace to the region.

THE STEEL BONNETS offers a surfeit of detail. At times, as Fraser brings on stage the multitude of principal characters and attempts to unravel the maze of ever-shifting family alliances and feuds (Scot vs. Anglo, Scot vs. Scot, Anglo vs. Anglo, everybody vs. everyone), the reader may decide the author went over the top. However, the story is never uninteresting, and the social chaos is appalling.

If the reader was delighted by the humor in Fraser's other books, e.g. the McAuslan and Flashman series, there may be some disappointment as this narrative is relatively straitlaced. However, even here the author's dry wit occasionally shows. Regarding the assumption of the English East March Wardenship by Henry Carey in 1588:

"... his notion of Border justice was that the only good reiver was a dead one - a point of view which has much to be said for it. Possibly the fact that he suffered from gall-stones made him irritable, for he started in office as he meant to continue, by hanging Scottish thieves."

And, as always, Fraser's prose is a joy to behold, as demonstrated by his closing remarks:

"Only now and then, if your romantic imagination is sharp enough, there can come a little drift from the past ... most vivid of all, perhaps, in a little fellside village at night, when there is a hunter's moon and a strong wind, and the black cloud shadows hurry across the tops, and beasts stamp in the dark, and an inn door down in the village opens and slams with a blink of light, and the rough Norse voices sound and laugh and die away ... The old Border is buried a long time ago, and there is hardly a trace now to mark where the steel bonnets passed by."