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The name "Rutledge" is a place name. It meant "red lache or pool" from the old Anglican words "redd", meaning red, and "loec" - later "lache", variant "letch" meaning a stream, or a pool in boggy land. "Rutledge" was "a great Border name". Anciently, those of that name were said to dwell "by the waters (of Bale", or Bailey Water, later called Routledge Burn, in the township of Bailie, or Bailey, near Bewcastle in the southern part of The Debateable Land on the English-Scottish Border.

This area so long in dispute between the English and the Scots was settled before the Norman Conquest as part of the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria by the Angles. The people of this part of the Border in time came to be organized into tribes or clans. This was the land of freebooters and raiders. "These trackless and desolate regions", he says, "were notorious for the activities of troopers before the Union" in 1603. This land was "no other thing but theft, reiff, and slaughter", until the boundary was finally agreed upon in 1552. John Lang in his Stories of the Border Marches refers to "the wild men of Bewcastle".

For many centuries Carlisle and Bewcastle township were within Scotland. The township is now in England in the County of Cumberland along the present border, on high land, an area of rolling hills. Anciently, Bewcastle was the site of a Roman Fort or Station. In 1470 Edward IV granted the manor and castle, which had long lain waste, to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, then Lord Warden of the Western Marche. He sublet the area to Cuthbert Rutlege, John Rutlege, Robert Elwold (Elliot) and Gerald Nickson (Nixon). The remains of a pele tower, or castle, still stand and the old church of St. Cuthbert is kept in good repair.

Undoubtedly, the earliest known location of the Rutledges was on the Bailey Water, at Kershopefoot, at Masthorne and between Kershopefoot and the Leven (now the Line) waters, all nearby places "within the Rule of Bewcastell". The Kershope burn is now part of the modern boundary line between the two countries.

For more on the origin of the Rutledge surname, please visit: http://www.rootsweb.com/~rutledge/origins.htm
You may also want to visit The Rutledge Family Association Website at:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~rutledge

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