Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Early Development of the Laws of the Anglo-Scottish Marches 35
The giving of redress was, however, to some extent dictated by issues of
local rank and standing. The importance of men like Dacre and Douglas
was such that their disputes could easily drag the whole border region into
open conflict, and so Percy had himself paid the award against Dacre,
to ensure that the truce was kept. Where lesser men were concerned,
it was probably regarded as more important to ensure that cross-border
antagonisms were not exacerbated by excessive awards against either side
than that exact justice should always be done. A letter sent by the earl
of Northumberland to his bailiffs at Alnwick in 1378, directing them to
inquire into the goods of Scots taken by Englishmen since a recent truce,
and asking for information as to the value of those goods, so that he knew
how much to claim from the Scots at the next march day, 30 shows that in
the fourteenth century, as in the sixteenth, 31 wardens tended to aim for
reciprocity in their dealings with their opposite numbers by trying to make
demands for reparations of equal value. Presumably their control over the
personnel of the juries which awarded redress was such as to enable the
wardens to ensure that jurors did not upset this particular applecart. The
fact that awards (even small ones, sometimes) 32 were quite often paid by the
wardens 33 must have done much to give the march laws such effectiveness as
they had.
It seems unlikely that this practice was adopted solely in order to ensure
that justice was done across the frontier. It is significant that Percy's letter
of 1371 was addressed to the royal chancellor, for there was an important
political dimension to such cases. This stemmed from the Franco-Scottish
alliance which remained in force, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For England this meant the danger
of a double attack: when she was at peace with France she might be
less inclined to make concessions to Scotland, but when she was at war
with France, and particularly when that war was going badly, she became
willing to conciliate the Scots. The importance of march days as a means of
conciliation, by ensuring that truces were observed and satisfactory redress
given for breaches of them, was all the greater because there existed other
means of obtaining reparations which could only have exacerbated ill-feeling,
based on self-help.
Several truces and treaties mention the injured party's right to pursue
stolen goods. In the procedure described in 1249 and 1308 pursuit was
to be closely followed by judicial proceedings, but this had then become
impossible, and recovery came to be a simple matter of following, perhaps
with hound and horn, within a time limit which came to be laid down as
30 SCI/43, no.86.
31 T.I. Rae, Administration of the Scottish Frontier, 56.
32 E.g. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1385-1389, 412, the sum of £7.18s.4d.
33 E.g. RotuliScotie, ii (Record Commission, 1819), 18,21,37; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1381-1385,
137-38; DURH3/32, m 6.