Disgraceful Histories

For this post I'm digging back further into history - or even myth - but the story starts just yesterday when I was chatting with a new Facebook friend. I was telling her about my blogging activity and when she learned that I was a Crozier she remarked that my surname, like her own, Hall, came from the Borders (the area around the English Scottish border, that is). They numbered among the Border Reiver families who raided and thieved along the border particularly in the 15th and 16th Centuries. Other prominent names included Forster, Hume, Kerr, Charlton, Scott, Johnstone, Maxwell, Eliot and the mighty Armstrongs.

All this brought to mind the Border ballad, "The Death of Parcy Reed", which involves both Croziers and Halls. The ballad tells the story of how the Croziers were at feud with Parcy Reed, the head of the Reed family. They persuaded another family, the Halls, to invite Parcy Reed out for a day's hunting and lure him into a trap laid by the Croziers. When the hunting party reached a desolate spot high on the border along came a party of Croziers. The Halls fled and poor old Parcy Reed was murdered.
Interestingly, it was the Halls' reputation that suffered most as a result of this occurrence. The local population and the balladeer both seem to have taken at least as dim a view of treachery as of murder and the Halls were branded 'the false Halls'.

Is the ballad based on a real event? It's not certain but in the context of border history at the time the story is at least plausible. There are a number of versions of the ballad - here's a link to one of them.

If this has whetted your appetite for more tales of murder, adventure and derring-do from the Borders you could do no better than read George MacDonald Fraser's The Steel Bonnets, HarperCollins; New Ed edition (9 Mar 1989).

So, are the Moorfield Croziers descended from bandits and murderers? To find out more read the next exciting episode!