It is a truism that the Middle March's geographical location on the frontier between two periodically hostile kingdoms affected its political, administrative, social, economical and cultural circumstances. The presence of that borderline inevitably meant that the Middle March developed borderspecific characteristics that differentiated the region from Lowland Scotland. Additionally, the topographical nature of the land, moors, hills and ‘wastelands’, separated from the Lothians by the buttresses of the Moorfoot Hills and the Lammermuirs, contributes to an impression of an area ‘apart’ from its lowland neighbours: an ‘out-countrey’ divided from the ‘incuntry’; the barbarian dales from the ‘lawlands’; a region on the periphery of the kingdom, separated physically from its ‘centre’ in Edinburgh. Most recent work on frontier societies highlights these differences, pointing instead to the similarities, on some international borders, between the regions on either side: cross-border acculturation and/or assimilation, fraternisation and intermarriage, cultural and social similarities and militarisation which blurred the day-to-day significance of a political demarcation. The result has been the identification of a frontier zone, stretching for some miles back either side of the borderline. Thus for many historians, such as Patricia Bradley, the Anglo-Scottish border was not ‘a line drawn on a map’, but a ‘distinct area’ in which ‘No distinction must or, indeed, can be made between the men who claimed allegiance to England and those who were Scottish subjects … [T]hese men had far more in common with each other than with anyone else … [sharing] a similar economy, a similar dialect, and similar dislike of outside authority.’