How do you measure a place? A community? A spirit? It is a media-driven cliche that all communities, especially when struck by disaster, must be deemed “close-knit”. Politicians, meanwhile, give speeches suggesting that chaos is running amok and destroying these supposedly confident communities, leaving us with nothing better than an atomised society in which the ties that bind have been loosed with depressing consequences. This seems something Ed Miliband believes.
He should be in Selkirk today. This is the first Friday after the second Monday in June and that means it is Selkirk Common Riding day. This is the most important, grandest day in the town’s calendar and one reason why there’ll be no more blogging here before Monday. The origins of the ceremonies are lost to history but able-bodied men have been charged with riding the boundaries of the town’s common lands for at least five centuries. This has become a ceremonial procession but in times past it was a matter of some necessity, checking that neighbouring lairds had not encroached upon the town’s land. Since sheep and the wool trade were a vital part of the town’s business, grazing rights and the common land were of more than just some import.
This morning and probably before you read this Mick Craig – the man charged with carrying this Royal & Ancient burgh’s standard around the Marches – will have returned the town flag “unsullied and untarnished” and he will have done so having led as many as 400 riders across the river Ettrick and up into the hills and back to Selkirk again. Safe Oot, Safe In as the signs in all the shops this week tell us.
All the Border toons have their summer festivals but Selkirk, Hawick, Langholm and Lauder are the only ones that ride their Marches. Selkirk’s is unusual in being the occasion for pride and sorrow alike. Blame King James IV for this. His rash – that is, loopy – decision to keep a promise made to the King of France (the kind of pledge that was rarely reciprocated) brought his own death and disaster to our town. The story has it that 80 men from Selkirk and the Ettrick Forest joined James on his fateful expedition into England in 1513. Their destination, alas, was Flodden Field and of those 80 men only one returned alive to Selkirk.
He bore with him a captured English pennant and when Thomas Fletcher, for so he was named, was asked what had befallen his comrades he is said,according to legend or folklore it is convenient to believe, to have waved the flag before lowering it to the ground in silent testimony to the disaster that had befallen Scotland and Selkirk too. The casting of the burgh standard in the video above is a re-enactment of that terrible day in 1513 and a tribute to them that fell then and also to all those who have fought in wars since.
Add the contributions of the Merchant Company, the Weavers, the Fleshers, the Hammermen, the Colonial Society (exiles) and the Ex-Servicemen each of whom’s own Standard Bearers cast their own colours and you begin to appreciate that few families in the town and its surrounding estates and villages are left untouched by the Common Riding.
Above all it is a profoundly and proudly conservative institution. Which means it has changed over the years but done its best to weave those changes into the traditions of the past and render them imperceptible to all but the keenest reactionaries hellbent on standing athwart either history or reality. Sensibly, these modifications are considered addiitions and adornments to the rare old past. They do not threaten those traditions; they enhance them. It is a proper conservatism, neither hidebound by the past nor afraid of the future but rather confident that the immemorial customs will be appreciated by the next generation provided they are presented to them in a properly sympathetic fashion. It takes work to preserve it but the work is worth it.
These are the permanent things, the stuff that binds and that engenders the kind of civic pride that says This is Who We Are while brooking no compromise nor asking for any apologising about any of it. The Border ridings – and I doubt that outside Newmarket and Lambourn any part of Britain can put more men and women into the saddle than the Borders – matter because they are valuable in their own right and to their own people but also because they are a particular, though far from prescriptive, demonstration that history and community aren’t useless bromides but actually things that live and breathe and ride. Nor – and this is important – are they tourist events, though visitors are always welcome.
Perhaps it is easier to appreciate this in a small and rural town but I warrant it is also more true of city communities and even suburban ones too than politicians like to admit. The modern world poses challeges to all these things but that scarcely means defeat or decline is inevitable. Many places miles from Selkirk will have their own local stories and traditions; these too need cherishing and nurturing and sustaining and you should probably do all you can to help achieve that. Yup. Meanwhile, the Common Riding begins in less than two hours time so I must be on my way….
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