Dryfe Sands

A great house is rarely undone by a foreign army. More often it is undone on its own ground, on an afternoon it had counted upon, by a smaller neighbour who has learned the country better. The numbers on the muster roll are one kind of truth. The shape of the field at four in the afternoon, in December, with the burn running brown and the saltmarsh sucking at the horses' fetlocks, is another. The warden who confuses the two does not get a second reading.

THE WARDEN OF THE WEST MARCH

John Maxwell, eighth Lord Maxwell, was forty years old in the winter of 1593, and he had been Warden of the West March of Scotland by King's commission since 1577. His father, the seventh Lord, had been killed by the Johnstones of Annandale in 1552; the feud was older than he was, and he had inherited it the way a man inherits a name and a coat. The Maxwells held Caerlaverock and the lordship of Nithsdale; their following ran from Galloway to Dumfries, in tenants and in bonds of manrent with the Crichtons of Sanquhar and the Douglases of Drumlanrig. Against this stood Sir James Johnstone of Dunskellie, chief of a smaller surname holding the upper waters of the Annan, master of Lochwood, and a horseman who had ridden every burn between the Esk and the Clyde since he was eight. The quarrel had run through two generations of ambush and counter-ambush, of stolen cattle and burnt barns, of bonds signed at Holyrood and broken before the ink dried. In the autumn of 1593 it came at last to the field, because Maxwell, with the warden's commission in his pocket and four men to Johnstone's one, judged that this season he could end it.

THE APPROACH

On the morning of the sixth of December he brought his column up the west bank of the Annan in a thin, dry cold, the sky overcast, the grass bleached, the saltmarsh between Lockerbie and the river running flat to the east in the low winter light. Two thousand men were behind him, the Maxwell name and the Maxwell allies, the household horse at the head in plate over buff, the foot in jacks and steel bonnets, the lances trailing. Word came in from the riders that Johnstone had taken station on the rising ground a half-mile east of the Dryfe Water, on hard footing at the edge of the marsh, with perhaps four hundred horse and foot. Maxwell read the ground from the saddle. The only ford in the next two miles was at the confluence of the Dryfe with the Annan. The cavalry would have to take it in column. The wings would not deploy. The numbers on his side of the burn would not be the numbers on the far side until the last horse was over.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE FORD

He sat his horse at the head of the column and weighed it. The numbers are the numbers, he thought, as any warden in Scotland would have thought, looking at a four-to-one column behind him. And then, against that, the country itself: the burn at his stirrup, the soft sand under the hoof, Johnstone's standard on the dry rise opposite, set there an hour before he came up. Johnstone has chosen this ground. Johnstone knows what the ground will do to a column at the ford. He could have drawn off, taken the column south to the bridge at Lockerbie, come up on the dry side and made his weight tell at the line. To do that was to give Johnstone the afternoon, and the rumour of it, and another season of the feud. He had come into the country to settle a thing his father had carried to his grave. He gave the order to advance at half past three. The Maxwell horse went down to the ford in column. Behind them, two thousand foot began to crowd onto the soft bank, the press tightening as the head of the column slowed in the water. The Johnstone horse waited in the lee of the rise on the eastern side, out of sight, where it had been waiting since noon.

THE STROKE

The first hundred Maxwell horse crossed in twenty minutes; the water was cold and the eastern bank was mud to the girth. As the second hundred took the water, the Johnstones came over the rise at the gallop and struck the bank. The Maxwell horse, half-formed, broke at the first shock. The break ran back through the column. The foot on the western bank, two thousand strong and unable to come on, saw the line at the bank fold, and folded with it. Maxwell himself was carried forward and then unhorsed in the press at the eastern edge of the water, on foot in the saltmarsh in plate and the wet. By the testimony of three of his men taken prisoner that afternoon, he called for quarter and offered his sword to a Johnstone gentleman whose name has not come down. The gentleman took the sword. As he was taking it, William Johnstone, called the Galliard, younger brother of Sir James, came up at the gallop, recognised the warden by the badge on the surcoat, and delivered a single downward sword-stroke across the unhelmeted face that opened the man from brow to jaw. Maxwell went down on the wet sand. He was dead within the minute.

THE QUIET HOUR

Through the next hour the Maxwell line fell apart along a mile of bank. Eight hundred of the surname were left on the field, by the count made in the parish registers of Lochmaben and Lockerbie the week after. The Johnstones lost under a hundred. Sir James Johnstone rode back to Lochwood at dusk with the Maxwell standard rolled at his knee and the warden's helmet on his saddle-bow. On the dry rise, in the last of the light, the prisoners were being walked east. The Galliard, twenty-three years old, came down through the saltmarsh on foot, the stroke still on his blade, and looked at what he had done. The country had a word for it before the week was out. To lockerbie a man, in the dialect of Annandale and Dumfriesshire, was to deliver a sword-cut downward across the face, and the cut on the warden was the prototype. The verb is in the Scottish National Dictionary, attested in print from the late seventeenth century. A surname had become a verb in the mouths of the country it had ruled, and the verb described the manner of its undoing.

EDINBURGH

The Crown read the field the next week. The Privy Council in Edinburgh took the news without surprise; the West March had been a Maxwell warden's command for sixteen years, and now the Maxwell warden was on the wet sand at Dryfe and his line was scattered between Lockerbie and the Annan. The wardenship passed. The bond between Maxwell and Johnstone was, in fact and in law, broken. King James VI, who had a year before written to both lords commanding peace, set the council to gather depositions and let the feud lie, knowing that the field had done what the Crown could not. The ninth Lord Maxwell, the warden's son, ten years old in 1593, grew up to take the matter back into his own hands. On the sixth of April 1608, at Achmanhill near Beattock, he shot Sir James Johnstone in the back at a meeting arranged for reconciliation, was tried for it at Edinburgh, and was beheaded on the twenty-first of May 1613. The feud was at last ended in council, by the interposition of the Crown, with both chiefs in the ground.

RETURN

The saltmarsh at Dryfe is mostly drained farmland now. The Dryfe Water still runs to the Annan at the same confluence, the ford is no longer used, the rise on the eastern side is a hedge-line. On the four hundredth anniversary, in 1993, the Maxwell Society of Caerlaverock set a stone in the field on the western bank, where the column waited to cross. The Galliard, who lived another forty years and outlived his brother, is buried by family tradition in the churchyard at Lochmaben, in an unmarked grave; two graves over, on a headstone of the right century, the word lockerbie in its verbal sense is cut into the local stone, the only memorial he is known to have.

A great house is undone on its own ground, by the neighbour who has read the country better, on an afternoon that the muster roll had promised. The Maxwell power on the West March, which had stood since the thirteenth century, was broken between half past three and half past four on the sixth of December 1593, and was never reassembled. What survives of it, beyond the stone in the field, is a single verb in the dialect of the country it once held: the cut the Galliard gave the warden, kept in the mouths of the Dumfriesshire farmers for four hundred years, the act outliving the name that gave it the chance to happen.