I recently learned that the majority of my family on both sides is Scottish, with the clearest line of descent from the Hume surname, from clan Home. Are there any Scotland/ clan specialists who would be interested in telling me more about my family, or the border-reivers in general?

by ringnamebutcher

I would love to know about the historic origin of the Home clan, and of course anything else worth noting.

I keep coming up with something called border - reivers... what does that mean? Who are they?

Thank you so much for your time. This is a great subreddit!

iliketeaalot

I can't help you much, but the late and brilliant author George MacDonald Fraser probably can. His book The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers is very excellent. Taking my copy down from the shelf, I find that the index has 13 entries for "Humes, the", 21 for various Lord Humes, and 3 for Hume Castle.

The Border Reivers were, basically, raiders. After reading a bit of the history of that area during the relevant era (roughly, the Renaissance), it seems a wonder that anyone actually produced anything there. It seems as though they only stole things back and forth.

BTW, Mr Fraser's fiction is not to be missed. His "Flashman" novels are brilliant and hilarious and the historical elements are highly accurate.

His book The Candlemass Road is serious historical fiction set on the Anglo-Scottish border and The Reavers is more of a romp, but still is informed by Mr Fraser's considerable historical knowledge.

ctesibius

Briefly, there was an area about 120 miles wide between Scotland and England sometimes called the Debatable Lands, where neither country had full control. There were fortified positions like Carlisle, Barnard Castle, and Durham (the bishop of Durham was given temporal powers and was known as the Prince Bishop). Outside these, life was more clan-oriented, with families like the Nixons and Dobsons on the southern side, and Home and Scott to the north being known as "riding names", i.e. rievers (raiders). While there were clan feuds, conflicts would involve skirmishes of a couple of hundred people, not full scale war.

Architecture of the region sometimes reflected this. Farms might have a fortified pele tower. BTW the pictures in Wikipedia are larger than the ones I've seen, which are more suited to holding the family and staff of a single farm and some of the animals. They were intended to cope with raids, not siege. Many still exist and are occupied as part of farms: if you are in England, there's one which is part of the Beamish open air museum.

This period came to an end in 1603 when James VI took the English throne as James I.