There have been others, of course, who might perhaps be recognised as Border highwaymen, though not many of them could claim to have achieved even moderate notoriety.  Drummond, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1730, certainly began his infamous career in the north, but that was quite a petty beginning, and—­at least after his return from transportation to the Virginian Plantations—­his chief haunts were Hounslow or Bagshot Heaths, or other places in the neighbourhood of London.

But at least there was one Border highwayman—­or is “footpad” here the more correct term?—­who, if the story is true, may surely claim to have been the most picturesque and romantic of criminals.  In this instance the malefactor was a woman, not a man, and her name was Grizel Cochrane, member of (or at least sprung from) a noble family, which later produced one of the most famous seamen in the annals of naval history.  Her story is very well known, and it may therefore be sufficient to say here that her father, having been concerned in one of the many political conspiracies which in those days were judged to merit death, lay in prison under sentence, and that, to save his life, the brave lady, disguised as a man, on two separate occasions, on Tweedmouth moor, robbed the mail by which her father’s death warrant was being conveyed from London to Edinburgh.  Thus she twice prevented the sentence from being carried out, and eventually the prisoner was pardoned.

The greater number of highway robberies in the Border, however, were accomplished without the aid of a horse or the disguise of a crape mask.  The Border highwayman, as a rule, was no picturesque Claude Duval, no chivalrous villain of romance who would tread a measure in the moonlight with the lady whose coach he had plundered, thereafter returning her jewels in recompense for the favour of the dance.  He was much more often of the squalid type—­in a word, a footpad—­frequently a member of some wandering gipsy gang, who, attending country fair or tryst, had little difficulty in ascertaining which one of the many farmers present it would be easiest and most profitable to rob as he steered his more or less devious course homeward in the evening across the waste.  What the farmer had that day been paid for his cattle or sheep he usually carried with him, probably in the form of gold; for in those days there were of course no country agencies of banks in which the money might be safely deposited.  Not unusually, too, the farmer had swallowed enough liquor to make him reckless of consequences; and the loneliness of the country-side, and the absence of decent roads, too often combined with the condition of the farmer to make him an easy prey to some little band of miscreants who had dogged him from the fair.