10/09/2026
Max Crozier
š In 1587 the Scottish Parliament sat down and wrote out a list of the families it could not control.
The Act for the quieting and keeping in obedience of the disorderit subjectis inhabitantis of the Borders, Highlands and Isles came with a roll attached, naming the clans and surnames of the Border country by name. It was not a compliment. It was an admission. These were the riding families of Liddesdale, Annandale, Eskdale, Teviotdale and the Merse, and for three hundred years they lived in a strip of land where neither crown could reach and took what they needed on horseback.
They built peel towers instead of houses. They were held responsible as whole surnames rather than as individuals, so what one man did, the name answered for. And when James the Sixth went south in 1603 and abolished the frontier overnight, he turned on them without mercy. Men were hanged without trial, families were transported to Ireland, and the name Borders was replaced in official language with the Middle Shires.
They went to Ulster, and from Ulster to Pennsylvania and the Carolina backcountry, and they carried the same reputation with them the whole way.
If your surname is here, your people were not settled folk. They were the ones the government wrote a law about.
