The Festival Where Scotland’s Violent History Comes Back to Life

It’s 10 a.m. on a Friday in June, and “the Hut” in Hawick, Scotland, is heaving. Some 500 men are packed into the low wooden structure, banging tables, straining under bottles of beer and glasses of rum and milk. In comes the cornet flanked by his right- and left-hand men, all three in ties, top hats, green frocks, breeches and boots. Soon the whole company breaks out in roaring song, toasting their town and the men who have come before them to defend it against English soldiers and other armed intruders.

Hawick lies deep in the rolling hills of the Scottish Borders, one of Scotland’s 32 council areas, and this is the emotional climax of its common riding, one of Europe’s largest equestrian festivals that, once a year, brings to life a lawless time that strongly shaped the region’s shared identity. From the early 14th century, Scotland and England were almost continuously at war for 250 years, and the Borders, sandwiched in between, bore the brunt of the fighting. To make matters worse, this was also the heyday of the Border Reivers, whole clans of cattle-stealing marauders who plundered and pillaged on both sides of the frontier.

“You could never be very sure if someone wasn’t going to appear with a band of armed men, either in pursuit of land or simply to rob your livestock,” says Michael Brown, a historian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

During this violent and uncertain period, a longstanding custom took on even greater importance: the riding of the marches. Lacking formal borders, communities would regularly mark the boundaries of their common land, where locals could collectively graze their livestock and cut peat. Technically, this is what Hawick’s common riding now commemorates, alongside the capture of an English flag by Hawick’s youth in 1514. More than that, though, the festival is an exultant celebration of Hawick’s community, igniting…