Battle lines: John Rudkin (left) has had four life-threatening phone calls, two sets of smashed windows, and his door locks packed with expanding foam; someone rode a horse at Norman Pender (right).

JAMIE BATTEN had a car driven at him. Someone rode a horse at Norman Pender. Davie Paterson picked up the phone to hear ``you're a dead man''. Frank Scott was told he'd get his face filled. John Rudkin has had four life-threatening phone calls, two sets of smashed windows, and his door locks packed with expanding foam. Mansfield Motors, where Mandy Graham's father works, suffered #100,000 worth of damage in a suspicious fire. Understandably, Mandy Graham and Ashley Simpson no longer go out on Saturday nights.

Punches thrown, businesses boycotted, reputations smeared, families split down the middle, a blizzard of hate mail, lifelong friends who no longer speak, mothers against daughters, husbands against wives. And all because two women want to ride at Hawick Common-Riding. Calling this ``sexism'' is like saying Macbeth was inhospitable. Technically accurate, but hardly an explanation. For that, we have to look a little closer.

IT'S a chilly Thursday night in Burnfoot Community School and the doughty are gathering for a meeting of the significantly-named Lady Riders Association, setting out the stacking chairs and trestle tables, opening the biscuit tins for the collection of membership fees. The hall echoes with gossipy, gung-ho spirit, women crossing the floor to speak to friends and acquaintances, never passing Ashley or Mandy without a pat on the arm, a clap on the shoulder, touching them as if they were totems whose contact brought good luck.

And maybe they are. They're certainly nothing so straightforward as feminists. ``Totally the opposite,'' Graham asserts. Simpson shakes her head and disavows any interest in bra-burning. Around this point you start to understand what everybody keeps telling you: in Hawick they see things differently.

The facts are these: six months ago two women notified the Hawick Common-Riding Committee of their intention to join the Denholm ride-out, one of seven unofficial rides during the five-week celebration. The committee failed to obtain an interdict banning them, and on what is now known, with a melodrama characteristic of this dispute, as Black Saturday, Simpson and Graham saddled-up.

Unprecedentedly large crowds turned out to guarantee scenes of unprecedented ugliness. Supporters of each faction tried to drown the other side out with cheers or boos. Graham and Simpson, the picture of decorum in their hacking jackets and immaculate white jodhpurs, rode through a soundtrack of abuse. ``Sluts'', ``scum'' and - a bad word indeed in Hawick - ``lesbians''. Most dramatic of all was the moment when a phalanx of over 50 women singing traditional Hawick songs moved in front of the horsewomen, sabotaging their attempt to join the cavalcade.

What's the difference between a Hawick woman and a Safeway trolley? It's a favourite joke in the Lady Riders camp. The answer? A Safeway trolley has a mind of its own.

Women make up at least half the 1400 members claimed by the Customs and Traditions Association set up to co-ordinate opposition to women riders (although curiously, they have recently broadened their remit to campaigning against a travellers' site). Whether they are representative of the wider female population is anyone's guess. Calculating the balance of feeling in Hawick is almost impossible. The 300-strong Lady Riders say levels of intimidation are such that people are frightened to join them. The one certainty is that a substantial section of the town couldn't care less either way.

Negotiations with the Common-Riding Committee having come to nothing, or nothing but an intensification of ill-feeling. Graham and Simpson are now taking action under the Sex Discrimination Act against five committee members including, emotively, this year's ceremonial figurehead, the Cornet Alan Wear. The women's case has the backing of the Equal Opportunities Commission.

At first glance it's an unlikely alliance. Acting chairman of the Lady Riders Association is the former rugby international Norman Pender, a father of daughters with a somewhat paternalist attitude towards the rest of womankind, a white knight whose chivalric code includes addressing ``ladies'' with cheerful innuendo.

He conducts the meeting on his feet; Graham on one side, Simpson on the other, silently looking up at him. After the speeches a seasoned campaigner with the Labour movement ventures to suggest that it might further the cause if Ashley and Mandy were actually allowed to speak. Meanwhile, if there's anything she can do to help...? Pender looks at her gratefully: ``We're desperate for a typist.''

An early supporter of the principle of female riders, Pender was approached by Simpson and Graham to accompany them on the Denholm ride-out and many believe only the presence of this 18-stone former bouncer saved them from serious harm. Now he's their champion, a position which clearly tickles his vanity, but which he fills at some personal cost. His business has suffered through the traditionalists' boycott, he's been banned by the Mosstroopers and lampooned in verse. His enemies brand him an instrument of political correctness.

COUNCILLOR John Rudkin likes to call himself a male chauvinist. ``Everybody else just calls me a big softy.'' Well, not everybody: I've heard several less admiring epithets in the Lady Riders camp. A thick-set man in paint-spattered overalls and flat cap, his vividly-weathered complexion lends him a faint but nagging resemblance to Mr Punch. A bit of a one-man cabaret by temperament, too. No sooner have I arrived than he's joking about how well Hawick men treat their women. As well as they treat their horses, in fact.

Rudkin is a passionate believer in keeping things as they are. For legal reasons we must draw a veil over the events that have landed him in court, on a charge of breach of the peace to be heard in two weeks' time. Even leaving that aside it has been a turbulent six months, what with the vandals and the death threats, but he believes in keeping a sense of humour. When his racehorse ran at Kelso recently he made sure it was ridden by a female jockey. Came in third. (Next time it'll win - with a man in the saddle). And guess what? His eyes glint with merriment. ``I've got a QC for my court case and it's a whatsit...'' for a moment the word escapes him ``...a female QC.''

Like other members of the Common-Riding Committee, Rudkin accepts that change, in a limited form, will come. But not yet. This trouble is entirely about personalities, he insists. Not the personalities of ``the girls'', of course: even those who villify them as evil regard them as dupes. No, the problem is Norman Pender. Born in Yorkshire, you see: not a true Hawick man. ``I think that's the biggest disappointment in his life.''

Rudkin is convinced that the bulk of the town sees things his way, and he's happy to have the issue decided by a referendum on December 4 which will offer a choice between the status quo and allowing women to ride at all Common-Riding events. (The Lady Riders Association, who have always maintained that they do not want access to everything, regard the ``all or nothing'' question as a fix and may ask supporters to boycott the vote).

But why is it so important that women are kept out? What makes this an issue worth tearing the town apart? It's the one question nobody can answer satisfactorily, though they seem to think they're making perfect sense. For once, Rudkin turns serious. ``Really, you'd have to change all the songs and all the poems if women were allowed.''

IN Hawick they like to joke that there's only one place more often immortalised in verse, and that's Heaven. A day out of Hawick is a day wasted, they say (and this is not a joke). ``Cow country,'' drawls one less-than-reverent native, and it's true you'll see lorries laden with hay grinding their way across town, but really it's soup-and-stovie Scotland, pragmatically picturesque, with a lacy river and a Scottish Baronial town hall and a string of bakers filling the High Street with a floury sweetness that follows you into the charity shops selling secondhand jumpers knitted in the local mills. There's a bar called Scrumz, and hairdressers with names like Klippers and Split Endz, and even in the chain stores you'll find sales assistants bred in the pleasing ways of small town politeness.

To set foot in the place is to be warmed by nostalgia. Nothing you could fix a date on, just the comforting reminder of days gone by. That's the charm of the past: it can be anything you want it to be.

IT is hard to overestimate the importance of Hawick Common Riding. Five weeks of celebration culminating in nine days of mass picknicking, horse races, dinners, a ball, cavalcades, chases and bewilderingly arcane ritual. For around a third of Hawick's 16,000 souls it's the highlight of the year. People paint their houses for it, buy new clothes for it, even go without holidays for it. Followers of the Cornet can spend #1000 on the hire of a horse and associated expenses. For two working days local businesses simply close down. If you don't like it you get out of town. And afterwards there are the unpaid bills, the monster hangovers, the pregnancies...

None of which detracts from the splendour of the occasion. There are other Common-Ridings in the Borders, but none quite like Hawick's. (Nor so sexually exclusive). It's a defining ritual, unique to the town, a mark of continuity. ``It's aye been,'' as they say. Although, as it happens, they're wrong.

History is a live issue in Hawick, as contentious as anything else in this row. From time to time, a journalist covering the dispute will be asked if it is possible to speak off the record. You agree, expecting some tidbit of unattributable character assassination, and sometimes that's what you get. But sometimes they start talking about what happened back in 1514.

Hawick Common-Riding is the product of two historical sources, the ancient practice of riding the Meiths and Marches, and the Battle of Hornshole, when a gang of local boys too young to fight at Flodden surprised a group of English soldiers a couple of miles out of Hawick, killed them, and bore their pennant back to the town in triumph.

Some question whether the battle ever happened, in 1514 or any other year. Some query the accepted details. Some just point to the creation of five female burgesses in 1537 as proof that the Common-Riding was not always an all-male event. The traditionalists reckon the women walked it. The debate then degenerates into a wrangle over levels of horse-ownership in the early 16th century.

Over succeeding centuries the Common-Riding's fortunes have fluctuated wildly. By the mid-19th century the occasion was largely an excuse to get drunk. In 1876 fewer than 10 horsemen took part, and until the 1970s numbers remained significantly smaller than the 300-odd now following the Cornet on Common-Riding Friday. In 1914 two horsewomen joined the cavalcade, and women continued to follow after the war until, in 1932, discontent among male riders came to a head and the Ladies were banned.

HAMPERED by 'flu and the sheer self-evident rightness of her cause, Shelagh Renwick, vice chairman of The Supporters of Hawick, its Customs and Traditions Association, is struggling to explain why the past 64 years of exclusively male tradition should be superior to the preceding 17 years or, indeed, to the custom 460 years ago.

Women already have their part in the Common-Riding, she explains: the picnic on the Moor, a family occasion attended by around 6000 people. And now the Lady Riders want to spoil everything. How? She looks pained. ``It'll change it - it's hard to say.'' Even worse, Graham and Simpson are trying to muscle-in on the moving ceremony at the end of the Cornet's official duties when he hands back the flag.

``There's no cheering because everybody realises the poignancy of the moment. The fifes and drums play and all you can hear is the metal of the horses' hooves and the jingling of the harnesses and then the saxhorn band strikes up with the invocation, and there's hardly a dry eye on the street.''

If she fails to make a logical case for the exclusion of women riders, she more than conveys the power of the occasion, its thrilling spectacle, the mysterious tug of ritual. ``It's hard to express what you feel in your heart. It's aye been -I hate the words -it's just that I feel our traditions are based on men taking the flag from Hornshole and I don't think that six women over 10 years who've ever followed the flag sets a precedent.''

The status quo lobby claim practical reasons, too, for keeping the Common-Riding single-sex. Already some 300 riders take part. If women were admitted, and not just Hawick women but women from outside too, that number could treble, doing enormous damage to farmland and running the risk of landowners withdrawing their permission. But there are ways of limiting numbers; why not ballot riders for places?

Sooner or later confronted with traditionalist adherents of Hawick Common-Riding, you hit this brick wall. They're not stupid people but their arguments don't hold water. So what is all the bitterness and passion really about?

In the absence of hard logic the imagination starts working overtime. If the Common-Riding were not a civic festival but an initiation ceremony, a rite of passage from boy to man, then it would be entirely natural to shun the contaminating presence of women. Consider the Acting Father, the unmarried Cornet, his duty to return the flag ``unsullied and unstained''. According to the Halberdier Jim Anderson, being Cornet wreaks powerful changes in those selected. He knows, he's watched 38 of them progress ``from their election nights, when they arrived as nervous young men, to the handing back of the Flag when you see the transformation to self-assured manhood.''

Yes, well, it's just a theory. There are plenty more.

Some say it's a conspiracy of the masons, others the Conservatives. Small towns have long memories. Everything connects. There are people in Hawick who believe that the decline of their economic fortunes and the entrenched position of the traditionalists in the Common-Riding row are cut from the same piece of cloth. Or, to switch metaphors, a small clique with a finger in every pie is unwilling to share out the pastry.

According to this version the Common-Riding is a club for Hawick's inner circle. Everybody knows who's on the committee, who's going to be chosen as Cornet and Acting Father, who gets tickets to the balls. There's never been an unemployed ex-Cornet. Just as the mills once closed ranks to prevent outside employers from moving in to Hawick and driving wages up, so those who run the Common-Riding are resisting any change which might loosen their grip on power.

There is of course a simpler explanation: what we have is a power-struggle all right, but it's the town itself which is losing its grip.

Hawick's a proud town, known for three things: its Common-Riding, its rugby and its knitwear. The rugby is going well, just a week before Black Saturday Hawick won the Tennents Scottish Cup, but there's trouble at the mills. Thirty years ago the textile industry employed over half the working population. Now it's under a quarter. At around 5%, unemployment is still modest, but the omens are bad: empty shops disfigure the High Street, along with all those charity outlets. A trading estate just out of town stands all-but empty. The old, prosperous Hawick, the old certainties, are starting to slip. And now women want to alter the Common-Riding. As if that weren't bad enough, when alteration is resisted, Hawick becomes a laughing stock around the world.

The famous pride is still there, just a little more beleaguered, a little more entrenched. And that's a source of pride too. ``Hawick was ever independent,'' as the song has it. The more opinion is ranged against them, the firmer they stand. In a changing world, the past has become their identity.

I tried to find a feminist in Hawick, but they sent me off to Selkirk where Susan Rae, ``their worst nightmare: a Hawick woman with a brain and a gob'', lives in grateful exile.

Rae describes the absurdities of the Common-Riding with taboo-busting relish. The young men who put off getting married so as not to ruin their chances of becoming Cornet. An acquaintance sobbing when her son was born in an ambulance outwith the town, because it meant he'd never achieve the ultimate honour. That headline on the front of the Hawick News: Ex-Cornet Cuts Finger (``He's a butcher, it happens.'') One year they wrote and complained to Margaret Thatcher because she was holding the general election on the ninth of June, and it clashed with the Common-Riding. ``They really think they are the centre of the universe.''

She married a Hawick man and, after two years of misery, left him. ``I'm a natural born feminist but I didn't realise it, people just told me I was weird.'' Much later, after marrying a native of Birmingham, she returned to the town. Hanging out the washing in their garden one day, her husband was approached by a deputation of old ladies demanding that he cease such unmanly activity forthwith.

However low their fortunes may sink in the wider world, there is one place where Hawick men still rule unchallenged. Councillor Rudkin thinks local women put men on a pedestal, ``I don't know why''. (That makes two of us, Johnny). Rae takes a more jaundiced view. ``The core is misogyny: women should be kept in their place.''

Prominent women are the exception in Hawick, mostly they do not rise to positions of power. Oddly for a town with a long history of female employment, they are famously submissive. There has been one female provost, Myra Turnbull; few expect to see another. Women's role is to be supportive, and in compensation they have the old myth about being the backbone of the community. According to Rae, ``A lot of them do believe their place is in the kitchen. It's very hard when you live in Hawick and are brought up there and work there. It's easier to stop thinking about it, and give in to it, than to fight a battle every day.''

The most striking feature of the Hawick Common-Riding row is its violence. Sure, both sides feel strongly - but death threats? Inevitably, this has its counterpart in the home. Max Paterson, parish priest of St Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, is disturbed by the level of domestic abuse in the town. Susan Rae took it seriously enough to become one of the founder members of Hawick Women's Aid. ``Whacking women is acceptable. They make jokes constantly about thumping their wives. A lot of my friends used to accept that your husband would whack you one. This was looked on as normal.''

But even Hawick cannot remain untouched by the late 20th century forever. Mandy Graham and Ashley Simpson may not be the last word in radical feminism, but they're a sign of rising expectations. Not yet a demand for equality, but the desire to be less unequal than they were. Suddenly the apocalyptic fears of the traditionalists make sense, those doomy prophecies that ``everything'' will change. Not rational, maybe, but visceral. Distantly they sense the end, not of a five-week festival, but of the way they live their lives.

The town's past, the Common-Riding, its masculine culture, are inextricable: this is what it means to come from Hawick. To introduce horsewomen in to the Common-Riding is to trigger a crisis of identity, the erosion of who they are.

``It's about holding back the tide,'' Rae believes. ``It's about panic and fear. Their industry's in decline, the economic state of the town is in decline, and they don't want to have to face their own failure. It's a violent reaction to having any authority challenged. They're feeling threatened, and when they're feeling threatened they get nasty.''

So how will it all end? The Sex Discrimination case is unlikely to pour oil on troubled waters. The Provost's Council, Provostless since the resignation of Tom Hogg, another casualty of the affair, has issued an ultimatum: unless the camps reach agreement there will be no Common-Riding next year. The traditionalists have responded with talk of a breakaway event. Six months after Black Saturday started the war of attrition, the people of Hawick talk of little else. Don't hold your breath waiting for a settlement. This is a town still whispering over what happened 482 years ago. The events of 1996 should keep them going for another 400 at least.