Scottish Border Surnames

Who Were the Border Reivers?

For three centuries — from roughly 1300 to 1610 — the Anglo-Scottish border was one of the most violent landscapes in Europe. In the absence of effective central government in either Scotland or England, extended family groups (called surnames or riding families) raided, counter-raided, rustled cattle, burned farmhouses, and extracted protection money from both sides of the frontier. These families — the Armstrongs, the Nixons, the Kerrs, the Elliots, the Scotts, the Grahams — were the Border Reivers.

They were neither purely Scottish nor purely English. Their allegiance was to family, not nation. An Armstrong on the Scottish side of the border was cousins with Armstrongs on the English side. When the English government raised a force to punish Scottish reivers, it was often led by English reivers who used the opportunity to settle scores with rival families, not to serve any national interest.

The Armstrong Dynasty

The Armstrongs were the largest of the Border surnames — at their peak, they could put 3,000 armed men on horseback. Their territory was Liddesdale, the most inaccessible valley in the Borders. Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, hanged by James V of Scotland in 1530, became the subject of one of the great Border ballads — a warning about how Scottish kings dealt with overpowerful subjects.

The surname Armstrong derives from a legend: a Scottish king unhorsed in battle was allegedly rescued by a man who lifted him back onto his horse, earning the name "strong arm." In reality, it is an occupational description — a strong-armed man, possibly a blacksmith or soldier.

Nixon

One of the most distinctively Border surnames — so associated with Liddesdale and the Scottish Borders that a Nixon in eighteenth-century Virginia could expect to be identified as of Border descent. The name comes from Nic(h)olson — son of Nicholas — contracted to Nixon through Border pronunciation. Richard Nixon, the US president, was of English Border descent through Quaker ancestors who settled in Pennsylvania.

Kerr

A powerful Borders family with two main branches — the Kerrs of Ferniehirst and the Kerrs of Cessford, both in Roxburghshire. The family folklore — that Kerrs are left-handed and their castles have left-handed (counterclockwise) spiral staircases — has been examined by archaeologists. Ferniehirst Castle does have counterclockwise stairs. Whether the left-handedness story is true or a later legend is contested.

Elliot

Like Armstrong, an Elliot could be found raiding on either side of the border. The family's power base was the upper Teviot valley. The spelling of this name is notoriously inconsistent in records — Elliot, Elliott, Eliot, Eliott — and the "correct" spelling is claimed by different branches of the family with considerable intensity.

The Reiver Legacy in America

The Border Reivers were broken as a social force by James VI of Scotland and I of England following the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Mass executions, transportation to Ireland, and forcible resettlement dismantled the raiding culture within a generation. Most Border families who were resettled went to Ulster — the Plantation of Ulster of 1610 — where they became the Scots-Irish who would later settle Appalachian America.

The culture of honour, blood feud, independence, and distrust of central government that characterised the Border Reivers did not disappear when they moved to Ulster and then to Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Appalachian mountains. Historians have traced direct connections between Border Reiver culture and the values of Scots-Irish Appalachia — the feuding (Hatfields and McCoys, both of Border descent), the whiskey-making, the military tradition, the independent churches. Armstrong, Nixon, Kerr, Elliot, Scott — these surnames appear throughout Appalachia today, still carrying traces of the border country.

Robert Burns — A Border Surname

Burns is a Borders surname — from the Scots word for a small stream. Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, came from Ayrshire (just north of the Border region proper), but the Burns family appears in Border records. The poet himself identified with the Covenanting tradition — a strongly Lowland and Border cultural inheritance — more than with the Gaelic Highland culture that Romantic-era Scotland was beginning to mythologise.