 In an attempt to deal with the growing problem, the English and Scottish monarchs installed local magnates, with extensive local connections and considerable power, as wardens of the marches, operating from around 1296 onwards (following the First War of Scottish Independence).The Wardens were tasked with keeping order and trying to enforce March law, a customary law that had evolved since the thirteenth-century and maybe earlier.The north of Cumbria formed the English West March (the regions either side of the border had been parcelled out in the fourteenth-century, into zones called marches).