The Galliard's stroke

Some feuds are closed by courts, and some by the slow erosion of the men who carried them. A rarer kind is closed in a single stroke, by a younger brother who has decided, on his own authority and without consulting the law, that twenty-two years of grievance will not be settled by a Privy Council clerk's hand.

THE BROTHER ON THE BAY HORSE

William Johnstone, called the Galliard across the Western March for his seat on a horse, was a second son. The first son, Sir James of Dunskellie, held Lochwood Tower and the chiefship of the Johnstones of Annandale; the second son held a sword and a reputation. Their father, John Johnstone of Dunskellie, had been killed by a Maxwell at the Crawford Moor business of 1585, and the feud that followed had run through eight winters of burnt steadings, lifted cattle, and night-riding across the wet ground between the Annan and the Esk. The Maxwells of Caerlaverock held the wardenship of the West March and had held the country since the thirteenth century. The Johnstones held Annandale. Between them lay a saltmarsh and a quarrel that neither family could now afford to lose.

THE MARCH IN DECEMBER

Word came down through the dales in the first week of December that John, eighth Lord Maxwell, had crossed the country with near two thousand men, the largest host raised on the West March in living memory. Sir James could muster four hundred at most: the Johnstones themselves, a wing of Scotts, a wing of Elliots, a handful of Grahams from the Debateable Land who owed Lochwood an old kindness. The numbers were against them by five to one. The ground, if the ground could be chosen, was not. The Maxwell column would have to come up through the confluence of the Dryfe Water and the Annan, three miles north of the market-town of Lockerbie, where the wet saltmarsh narrowed the line of advance to a column at a ford.

On the afternoon of the sixth of December the sky was the low pewter of a Solway winter, the light off the estuary going early. The Galliard sat his bay on the rise above the marsh in three-quarter plate over a buff coat, broad-sword across the saddle, watching the Maxwell standard come up out of the south. Sir James gave the order at twenty past four. The Johnstone horse went down the rise at the canter and into the Maxwell column at the ford, and the column, committed to its crossing in narrow order, folded.

THE HALF-HOUR ON THE SAND

What followed was not, in the proper sense, a battle. It was a rolling-back. The Maxwell front rank, taken in the flank by horse while still in column, broke against its own following ranks; the following ranks, pressed forward by the rear, could not extend into line on the soft ground. The Johnstone horse cut down through the press and out the far side, wheeled, and came back. The Maxwell men, fifteen hundred of them, began to retreat in disorder across the saltmarsh in the direction of the Annan ford, and the wet sand took the weight of their armour and held it.

THE STROKE

From the rise the Galliard saw it: at about a hundred yards down the marsh, at the broken edge of the press, John, eighth Lord Maxwell, forty years old, was on foot in the sand with his helmet off and about a dozen retainers closing round him. He had been unhorsed. He was, by the plain reading of the Border code, a quarter of a minute from offering his sword to Sir James of Dunskellie, and Sir James, by the same code, would take it.

The Galliard knew what the surrender meant. It meant that Maxwell would be ridden to Lochwood and from Lochwood to Edinburgh and from Edinburgh to a Privy Council chamber where clerks in good cloth would write the Crawford Moor feud out of existence in a formal instrument under the Great Seal, and his father's death, and eight years of night-riding, and the four hundred Annandale men on this marsh, would become a paragraph in a register. He set the bay at the canter down the rise, and as he came he was already thinking that the law of Scotland was a thing made in panelled rooms by men who had never stood on Crawford Moor in 1585, and that the just settlement of a thing is not always the settlement the courts will reach, and that a younger brother on a bay horse, in the half-minute between an unhorsing and a surrender, has the whole question in his own two hands and will not have it again.

He came through the retainer-line at the canter. They were trying to face him with half-pikes on soft ground and could not get the angle. The broad-sword was already up. The stroke he delivered was the one stroke a horseman of the Western March is trained from boyhood to deliver from the canter, two-handed, downward, across the face: it opened John, eighth Lord Maxwell, from the forehead to the lower jaw, and Maxwell went down on the wet sand and was dead inside the count of five.

THE TROPHIES TO LOCHWOOD

The action was over inside the half-hour. About eight hundred Maxwell dead were left on the marsh; the rest got back across the Annan in whatever order they could keep. Sir James took up the Maxwell standard from where it had fallen at the ford and the Maxwell-of-Caerlaverock helmet from where the Galliard's stroke had set it down on the sand, and rode the both of them back to Lochwood Tower the same evening through the failing light. The trophies were hung in the hall at Lochwood and were there in his grandson's time. The Maxwell power on the Western March, which had stood for three hundred years, was finished by sundown.

In Caerlaverock that night the ninth Lord, John's son, a boy of seven, was told what had been done to his father on the saltmarsh at Dryfe. He kept the knowledge in him for fifteen years. On the sixth of April 1608, at a meeting arranged in good faith at Achmanhill, he shot Sir James Johnstone of Dunskellie in cold blood and rode for the continent. He was taken in France, brought back, and beheaded at Edinburgh on the twenty-first of May 1613, the last Scottish nobleman to die on a scaffold for a private killing. The Galliard himself outlived his brother by two years and died at Lochwood of natural causes in 1610; he is buried in Lockerbie's neighbour parish of Lochmaben in an unmarked grave, by his own instruction.

THE PRIVY COUNCIL CHAMBER

The Maxwell-Johnstone feud, which the stroke on the sand had been meant to settle, was not settled. It ran through the country for another thirty years in burnings and small killings that the registers note in single lines. In 1623, in a chamber at Holyrood, on the direct intervention of King James, by then James VI of Scots and I of England, sitting in London, the Privy Council formally closed it in a written instrument signed by both houses. It is the only Scottish noble feud of the Stuart period that required the Crown itself to draw a line under it. The clerks who drew up the instrument did, in the end, write the Crawford Moor business out of existence in a paragraph under the Great Seal, twenty-eight years late, and by then the Galliard had been thirteen years in the Lochmaben ground and could not be asked whether he counted the half-minute on the sand a profit or a loss.

THE WORD IN THE COUNTRY

The country kept the stroke in its own way. The Dumfriesshire speech took the name of the nearest market-town and made a verb of it: to lockerbie a man is, in the Annandale dialect, to bring a horseman's broad-sword down two-handed across the face of a man on foot, the stroke the Galliard delivered on the saltmarsh at twenty past four on a December afternoon. The verb outlived the feud, the wardenship, the Border, the kingdom of Scots as a separate kingdom, and the saltmarsh itself, which is in our time drained farmland under grass. On the western bank of the Dryfe Water, where the ford was, the Maxwell Society of Caerlaverock set a stone on the four-hundredth anniversary in 1993. The stone faces south, towards where the column came up out of the winter light, and a word in the local speech for a particular downward cut from horseback.