page_title: History of Routledge surname 15th to 18th centuries
section_title: Routledge and Border Reivers
hierarchical_section_title: History of Routledge surname 15th to 18th centuries / Routledge in the 16th Century / Routledge and Border Reivers
caption_attribution_description: Anglo-Scottish border, with historical areas and dates (1227, 1482, 1552)
context_page_description: People with the surname Routledge, and its numerous variant spellings, are first found in historical records living along the Anglo Scottish border. During these 400 years, many volatile events directly affected the lifestyles of every border family, from tenant farmer to landlord to border official. Border inhabitants, commoner and aristocrat alike, lived through intermittent warfare, violent religious reforms, and periods of famine and pestilence. Under such constant stress, civility broke down the predominantly agricultural society based on feudal tenure. Lawlessness prevailed whereby the term Border Reiver characterized about 75 surnames, Routledge included, that engaged in livestock rustling as normal activity. Many Routledge men and their peers lived and died by the sword as the following chronology will attest. History recorded their misdeeds and misfortunes without acknowledging any joys and pleasures they might have experienced during these times. Ultimately, some of these rough and ready Routledges survived to move on and thrive in all walks of life in all parts of the modern world.
context_section_description: AD 1520s-1530s. People living along the Scottish/English border were so entangled in their dual heritage during the previous 200 years of intermittent warfare that they hardly knew or cared to which king or country they owed allegiance. Duty to family assumed utmost importance. When called upon during frequent hostilities either between the two countries or, just as often, between feuding overlords, nobility and commoner alike would don their steel helmets and pikes, saddle their "nags," as their small but robust horses were called, and head into a fray on one side or the other—but only to the extent it suited each man's own purpose.
  During truce or peace times, with their homelands neglected or ravaged by fire and sword, borderers, prompted by physical need or self-righteous anger, made a living rustling livestock, usually by cross-border incursions into enemy territory or maybe even closer to home if some feud or another needed settling. Rather than planting crops only to see them razed to the ground, reiving became normal routine for border inhabitants. Some 70+ surnames, including certain Routlege families, made a sporting game of these raiding activities, and the prize was booty; any goods that could be carried or livestock herded was fair game. Reiving parties sallied forth on horseback over bog and moss trails known only to the initiated. Sooner or later "hot-trod" posses and/or retaliation raids followed wherein the victims became perpetrators. Betrayal, ambush, and blind-siding all had a place in the game so that a raid might turn into a rout.
  Ludicrously, the political elite of both countries branded the reiving surnames as thieves and traitors, which would have been true enough if the so-called authorities had included themselves in those criminal categories. History shows that kings to nobles to officers of both crowns either complicitly or actively employed marauding tactics, each and all claiming their ends justified whatever means. In actuality, what was really happening was the beginning of the end of a centuries-old feudal system that kept the common-born population firmly under control of one noble-born master or another.
  Routledge families lived on both the English and Scottish sides of the border, including the most notorious communities such as Liddesdale on the Scottish side, or in Bewcastle and surrounding villages on the English side, all of which were situated adjacent to long-disputed, lawless territory called the Debatable Lands, a region "lying between the Sark and the Esk as far up the latter as its junction with the Liddel" which was "conveniently situated for the resort of lawless men of both nations [who]...had become demoralised by the incessant Border warfare into nothing better than banditti."
caption: Anglo-Scottish.border.history
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