Finally, a question that I’m qualified to answer! I’m a PhD student studying the Anglo-Scottish borders in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and I’m currently working on a chapter which touches on border crime and its effect on the region.

I’m going to focus on the West March, roughly equivalent to modern day Cumbria, which is the region my own research is on. In February 1581, a muster was undertaken which purported to list all of the able-bodied men of the region, and the ‘furniture’ (that is to say, the arms and armour) they had available for border service.

It isn’t a complete census of the inhabitants of the region: quite apart from the obvious issue that it doesn’t list women, children, or the old or infirm, it would suggest that the populations of most of the parishes were considerably lower than they had been in twenty years before, when the region should have been experience steady population growth.[1] It seems likely that the most marginal and poorest of the rural community, those least likely to be able to afford arms or armour, are under-represented. Nevertheless, it gives a good overview of the sorts of weapons the chief tenants and middling sorts of the rural community had to hand.

As you might expect, this varied depending on the distance from the border. Regions further from the frontier were more likely to muster men who brought gunpowder weapons, but there were also a higher proportion of able men “without furniture”, that is to say, able men who nevertheless did not own weapons or armour. So in Allerdale ward, south and west of Carlisle, out of 1,040 able-bodied men, only 244 were armed.[2] By comparison, in Eskdale ward, to the north and east of Carlisle, only one man owned a firearm, but very, very few individuals are without weaponry altogether.[3]

I’m going to focus on the Eskdale ward, as this covered the part of the country which were the victims of incursions from Scottish raiders or the English surnames most regularly. As a general overview, the vast majority of those mustered brought a spear or a lance, with a small minority of bowmen. Around half had their own caps, or small metal helmets. Perhaps around a quarter (although it varied from place to place) of those mustered also owned jacks, armour made by sowing small metal plates sown into a canvas jerkin, also described in the muster as “steale cotes”.[4]

I’m going to use Lanercost, just east of Brampton, as an example, because it’s a very pretty place. And, while reproducing a long list of names may not be the most enlightening form of historical entertainment, it’s one of the only glimpses we get into the regular people of this region and this time (even if it is an exclusively masculine and not entirely socially representative glimpse), and thinking about them is no bad thing.

So, thirty-one able-bodied men were mustered from Lanercost. Eight of them were armed with “Jack cap [and] spear”: Edmund Bell, Robert Bell, George Tollentier, Geoffrey Bell, John Smith, Richard Fidler, Thomas Bortholme, and William Fidler.

Then we get on to their less heavily armed, and presumably poorer neighbours. John Stemen, Randell Routledge, George Bell, John Bell, Thomas Bell, John Ridley, Christopher Bell, Christopher Snowdon, and Humphrey Fidler had caps and spears.

John Jackson, John Crake, Edward Watche, Christopher Burtholme, Christopher Bendall, and Robert Carrocke, meanwhile, had caps and lances, and Richard Wilson, John Dridon, Nicholas Dridon, Thomas Stevenson, and Robert Crowe came completely unarmoured with only lances to their name.

I’m going to have to confess my ignorance as to the exact technical distinction between spears and lances: they’re obviously recognised as different things, but both spear- and lance-wielders are grouped together in the summaries, so they weren’t different enough to be all that significant. I don’t think the distinction is anything to do with mounted warfare: if so, you would expect the wealthier members of the community to have lances instead of spears, while in fact the opposite seems to be the case.

Finally, and characteristically of these musters, only a small minority brought bows: John Pott and John Stevenson had cap and bow, while their presumably wealthier neighbour Christopher Burtholme had a jack, cap, and bow.

Bows, of course, took a serious amount of training to use effectively. A generation before, in 1536, the last great border magnate, William Lord Dacre, ordered his officials to give a discount to tenants who were trained archers.[5] Those days were long gone by the 1580s, of course, but Pott, Stevenson, and Burtholme were certainly part of an enduring, if somewhat dwindling, tradition of armed and trained tenants ready to assist in defending the frontier.