The Story of the Border Grahams

The Story of the Border Grahams, chiefest actors in the spoil is my new book, hot off the press!

The book is the result of three months of research and writing. And a couple of weeks of editing, and tearing out hair at the frustrations of publishing the result!

The book

A lot has been written about the border reivers over the past 400+ years. Mostly documentary, occasionally romanticising their exploits.

Sooner or later, they all turn to/on the ‘notorious Grahams’.

But do the border Grahams deserve to be singled out from all the other ‘riding families’? Were they really any worse? Can they even be lumped together like that?

This book sets out to answer the questions – to find out who ‘the Grahams’ really were and if they did deserve to be singled out from all the other riding families: the Armstrongs, Bells, Carletons, Carlisles, Carruthers, Charltons, Dacres, Dixons, Dodds, Douglases, Elliots, Hendersons, Hetheringtons, Humes, Irvings, Johnstones, Kerrs, Littles, Lowthers, Maxwells, Milburns, Musgraves, Nixons, Nobles, Olivers, Radcliffes, Robsons, Routledges, Salkelds, Scotts, Storeys, Taylors, Turnbulls, Wilsons… and all the others who caused havoc on both side of the Anglo-Scottish border for generations.

Why write the book?

‘It may be claimed for this Book that it was written on the only true principle, viz. to please the author, and furthermore, to enable him to resolve certain doubts.’

Howard Pease, 1912

The book kind of came about by accident. I was researching ‘the Grahams’ out of personal interest, and had masses of information from lots of different sources. I wanted to pull it together, to make sense of it all for myself. And, faced with all the references to people like ‘William of Rosetrees’ and ‘Robert of the Fald,’ try to work out who these individuals were, and where they fitted into the overall picture.

I also wanted to put them into the context of their times: why did they turn to reiving, what caused that centuries-long cycle of thefts and violence?

None of which I truly found answered in any of the otherwise excellent books on the reivers (as a whole) that have already been published down the years. Not least because they have all focussed on the reivers as a whole, with any mentions of the border Grahams limited to a few paragraphs here and there.

In those books and articles, I also spotted things that no one had ever questioned or challenged before. A lot of things have been copied from the works of previous authors, without going back to the original sources and questioning how accurate (or biased) they were. There were a few myths needed busting, for sure.

And after all that, the best way to make sense of it for myself was to create a narrative.

I ended up with 140,000 words! Which I did then to cut to 130,000 for the finished book. I think 412 pages is plenty long enough!

Why Amazon?

It was tempting this time to look for a ‘real publisher’. There is a certain snobbery about self-published books versus ‘real’ ones. And I admit, it would be nice to stroll into a bookshop and see mine on the shelves.

But then, only a few bookshops, along the borders, would bother to stock them. When the true audience is global one. Self-published books reach a far wider audience and (if any good!) sell better than most ‘physical’ ones in stores. I doubt my previous book (Port Carlisle, a history built on hope) would have ever hit sales in the hundreds had it not been self-published: there are only about 80 houses in the village, for a start!

I wrote this book for myself. I’ve published it to share what I’ve found with anyone interested enough to search for information online and stumble across it. (The bulk of the price is printing costs and Amazon’s cut. I’ve kept my royalties down to just over £1 a copy).