Resting in the Ground at St. John's


The beautiful brunette made her way back from the glass and granite bar with a Pole Dancer cocktail in each of her hands and a twinkle in her big brown eyes. It was a quiet Tuesday night, and the piano music added to the ambiance as we worked our way through the leather-covered drinks menu. We knocked back a couple more fruit-filled iced glasses at last orders, and retired upstairs to a spacious suite complete with chandelier and sunken bath in the West Wing of the County Hotel in Newcastle, directly opposite the Central Station. I pulled the net curtains to one side and looked up the street illuminated by sodium lights, watching a few stragglers laughing, singing and wobbling up past the worn and weathered yellow sandstone of the church of St. John the Baptist rising in the dark sky opposite.

We were celebrating the completion of my book ‘Dick the Devil’s Bairns’ with a rare night away to watch a Glaswegian comedian. Bairns didn’t have much humour in it, being a hefty historic true crime story of the worst of the Border Reivers, but what it did contain was a great deal of family significance for both us. The beautiful brunette, now lying on the large soft bed in a white bath robe, was a descendant of one of the Four Families of Tynedale - the Charltons, Robsons, Milburns and Dodds. We’ve all heard of the Five Families that make up the New York Mafia, being the Bonannos, Colombos, Gambinos, Genoveses and Luccheses, but the local Northumbrian organised crime gangs of the Sixteenth century aren’t so well known. There were also Four Families in neighbouring Redesdale, being the Halls, Reeds, Potts and Hedleys, and they were all more than capable of levels of violence that could make a wide-eyed modern Italian-American Mobster lift the rim of his flat cap, swiftly order a ham and pease pudding stottie, and throw in a token: ‘Whey aye, man,’ just to fit in.


Sir Robert Bowes reckoned in 1550 that if someone had been raided by one of the North Tyne or Redesdale families, then they’d be better off taking a part of the goods back in compensation rather than pursuing them through the Law as ‘if the thief be of any great surname or kindred and be lawfully executed by order of Justice, the rest of his kin or surname bear as much malice, which they call deadly feud, against such as follow the law against their cousin the thief as though he had unlawfully killed him with a sword. And will by all means they can seek revenge there upon.’


The Reivers stubbornly stuck to their land and family. More than 400 years later, they’re still there. Everyone in Northumberland at least knows somebody off a Riding surname or has the blood of the families in their veins. Bowes again noted in his State of the Frontiers and Marches between England and Scotland that the people ‘inhabit in some places three or four households so that they cannot, on such small farms, without any other crafts, live truly but either by stealing in England or Scotland. And the people of that country (especially the men) be loath to depart forth of the same but would rather live poorly there as thieves than more wealthily in another country.’ They were, like us two, hill people, and the cosmopolitan City centre, the stunning lit-up bridges, the boom from bars and inviting glow of take-away shops seemed a long way removed from the story; the crumbling pele towers and few remaining walls of bastle houses in bogs and on isolated moorlands, the tracks through the hills in bracken and heather.


But be it by chance, coincidence or design, just a couple of nights later, I accidently stumbled across a list of names of reivers that had been buried in the church grounds at St. John’s following their executions during the Pacification of the Border.


Alexander Davison, Anthony Stokoe, Reynold Charlton, Henry Dodds, Arthur Robson and Archie Rogers were all put in the soil there in 1605; John Hall, Archie and Thomas Armstrong, and Cuthbert and William Charlton went under in 1606, and John Pott, Simmy Armstrong and George Reed followed in 1607.


George Nixon, Bartram Potts and William Elliot were buried at St. John’s after they met with the rope or axe in 1611 while holes were dug for the bodies of Archie Reed, John Robson and William Armstrong in 1613. There they were, in the Parish burial records, so they were at least afforded consecrated ground on their death. The bones of the ancestors now hidden under concrete and steel, tarmac and paving stones at the busy interjection of Westgate Road and Grainger Street. It seemed ironic that the years long journey of writing the book should end here, right where it had ended for a number of the men. While I am a Tait, my paternal third great grandmother was a Falstone Robson, my second a Davison; on the maternal side my grandmother was a Scott, my fourth great grandmother a Whitehaugh Armstrong, the third a Nixon. The beautiful brunette was a Robson, with Davison, Hume, Hedley, Coxon, and Thompson DNA in her not too distant lineage. We were the people who stayed. Borderers.


I don’t know how or why I discovered those names in that location; the book was completed, and the publisher was in the process of sending it to the printers. It seemed to me as if they were reaching out, down the ages, to have the final word, as usual.


I’ll raise a Scotsman Colada to that.



The Church of St. John the Baptist



A wonderful 12th Century church with a square tower just over the road from Newcastle’s Central Station, St. John’s is worth a visit and bills itself as ‘an oasis of peace in the heart of a busy City centre.’ Historic and beautiful in its own way, St. John’s is open to visitors every day.

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