In 1306 the Prior of Durham wrote to King Edward, reminding him that many of the tenants of the barony of Coldingham had forfeited their property during the Scottish wars. Coldingham is a parish of Berwickshire on the Scottish Borders, near the southeast coastline, and home to the ruins of a medieval priory. A separate rental roll exists, which shows that as many as sixty tenants of Coldingham bore arms against the English between the submission of 1296 and August 1298. Three of them fought for Wallace at Falkirk. One, Roger le Pouer, was killed in the battle. Another, Adam Collan, survived but died shortly afterwards at Lilithgow, possibly of his wounds.
The third was Adam Bell. He held one toft and half a carucate. A toft was a house with a narrow strip of land, and a caracute a medieval unit approximating the amount of land a team of oxen could till in a single annual season. Adam, therefore, was a small landholder. He appears on the Ragman Roll of 1296, when the gentry of Scotland swore allegiance to Edward.
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| Coldingham Priory |
It seems Adam was still alive when his land was seized after Falkrik, and afterwards vanished. He had the same name as a famous north country outlaw, Adam Bell, who was said to haunt Inglewood Forest in Cumbria with two accomplices, William of Cloudeslee and Clym O’Clough. The oldest printed copy of this ballad dates from 1505 and the tale is probably much older. Perhaps the story was inspired by the survivor of Falkirk. Coldingham is in southeast Scotland and Inglewood Forest in Cumbria, but this isn’t a problem. In the Tudor era plenty of ‘Border Reivers’, as they were called, escaped justice by flitting back and forth across the border line. There is no reason to think their ancestors didn’t do the same. Adam may well have fled down to the English West March, and drifted into the company of a small band of thieves in Inglewood Forest.
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