Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/366

346 the Channel, and settled into an attitude of determined, and only occasionally suspended, hostility against the 'Southrons.' For twenty miles on either side of the Border there grew up a population who were trained from their cradles in licensed marauding. Nominal amity between the two countries operated as but a slight check upon habits inveterately lawless; and though the Governments affected to keep order, they could not afford to be severe upon offences committed in time of peace, by men on whom they chiefly depended for the defence of the frontiers in war. The scanty families in the fortified farms and granges in Roxburgh and Northumberland slept with their swords under their pillows, and their horses saddled in their stables. The blood of the children by the fireside was stirred by tales of wild adventure in song and story; and perhaps for two centuries no boy ever grew to man's estate, along a strip of land forty miles across and joining the two seas, who had not known the midnight terror of a blazing homestead—who had not seen his father or brother ride out at dusk harnessed and belted for some night foray, to be brought back before morning gory and stark across his saddle, and been roused from his bed by his mother to swear with his child lips a vow of revenge over the corpse. And the fierce feuds of the moss-troopers were but an expression in its extreme form of the animosities between the two nations. The English hated Scotland because Scotland had successfully defied them: the Scots hated England as an enemy on the watch to make them slaves. The hereditary