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[Picture: “The Gentlemen go by”]
THE SMUGGLERS
PICTURESQUE CHAPTERS IN THE
STORY OF AN ANCIENT CRAFT
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
“_SMUGGLER_.—_A wretch who_, _in defiance of_
_the laws_, _imports or exports goods without_
_payment of the customs_.”—DR. JOHNSON
ILLUSTRATED BY PAUL HARDY, BY THE AUTHOR
AND FROM OLD PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
[Picture: Title page]
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1909
* * * * *
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
_OPINIONS have ever been divided on the question of the morality_, _or
the immorality_, _of smuggling_. _This is not_, _in itself_,
_remarkable_, _since that subject on which all men think alike has not
yet been discovered_; _but whatever the views held upon the question of
the rights and wrongs of the_ “_free-traders_’” _craft_, _they have long
since died down into abstract academic discussion_. _Smuggling is_,
_indeed_, _not dead_, _but it is not the potent factor it once was_, _and
to what extent Governments are justified in taxing or restricting in any
way the export or the import of goods will not again become a living
question in this country until the impending Tariff Reform becomes law_.
_There have been those who_, _reading the proofs of this book_, _have
variously found in it arguments for_, _and others arguments against_,
_Protection_; _but_, _as a sheer matter of fact_, _there are in these
pages no studied arguments either way_, _and facts are here presented
just as they are retrieved from half-forgotten records_, _with no other
ulterior object than that of entertainment_. _But if these pages also
serve to show with what little wisdom __we are_, _and generally have
been_, _governed_, _they may not be without their uses_. _England_, _it
may surely be gathered_, _here and elsewhere_, _is what she is by sheer
force of dogged middle-class character_, _and in spite of her statesmen
and lawgivers_.
_CHARLES G. HARPER_
_PETERSHAM_, _SURREY_,
_July_ 1909.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER I
THE “OWLERS” OF ROMNEY MARSH, AND THE ANCIENT EXPORT 12
SMUGGLING OF WOOL
CHAPTER II
GROWTH OF TEA AND TOBACCO SMUGGLING IN THE EIGHTEENTH 24
CENTURY—REPRESSIVE LAWS A FAILURE
CHAPTER III
TERRORISING BANDS OF SMUGGLERS—THE HAWKHURST GANG—ORGANISED 39
ATTACK ON GOUDHURST—“THE SMUGGLERS’ SONG”
CHAPTER IV
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” IN HAMPSHIRE 47
CHAPTER V
THE “MURDERS BY SMUGGLERS” _continued_—TRIAL AND EXECUTION 60
OF THE MURDERERS—FURTHER CRIMES BY THE HAWKHURST GANG
CHAPTER VI
OUTRAGE AT HASTINGS BY THE RUXLEY GANG—BATTLE ON THE 78
WHITSTABLE-CANTERBURY ROAD—CHURCH-TOWERS AS SMUGGLERS’
CELLARS—THE DRUMMER OF HERSTMONCEUX—EPITAPH AT
TANDRIDGE—DEPLORABLE AFFAIR AT HASTINGS—THE INCIDENT OF “THE
FOUR BROTHERS”
CHAPTER VII
FATAL AFFRAYS AND DARING ENCOUNTERS AT RYE, DYMCHURCH, 94
EASTBOURNE, BO-PEEP, AND FAIRLIGHT—THE SMUGGLERS’ ROUTE FROM
SHOREHAM AND WORTHING INTO SURREY—THE MILLER’S TOMB—LANGSTON
HARBOUR—BEDHAMPTON MILL
CHAPTER VIII
EAST COAST SMUGGLING—OUTRAGE AT BECCLES—A COLCHESTER 111
RAID—CANVEY ISLAND—BRADWELL QUAY—THE EAST ANGLIAN “CART
GAPS”—A BLAKENEY STORY—TRAGICAL EPITAPH AT HUSTANTON—THE
PEDDAR’S WAY
CHAPTER IX
THE DORSET AND DEVON COASTS—EPITAPHS AT KINSON AND WYKE—THE 119
“WILTSHIRE MOON-RAKERS”—EPITAPH AT BRANSCOMBE—THE WARREN AND
“MOUNT PLEASANT” INN
CHAPTER X
CORNWALL IN SMUGGLING STORY—CRUEL COPPINGER—HAWKER’S 129
SKETCH—THE FOWEY SMUGGLERS—TOM POTTER, OF POLPERRO—THE
DEVILS OF TALLAND—SMUGGLERS’ EPITAPHS—CAVE AT WENDRON—ST.
IVES
CHAPTER XI
TESTIMONY TO THE QUALITIES OF THE SEAFARING SMUGGLERS—ADAM 151
SMITH ON SMUGGLING—A CLERICAL COUNTERBLAST—BIOGRAPHICAL
SKETCHES OF SMUGGLERS—ROBERT JOHNSON, HARRY PAULET—WILLIAM
GIBSON, A CONVERTED SMUGGLER
CHAPTER XII
THE CARTER FAMILY, OF PRUSSIA COVE 165
CHAPTER XIII
JACK RATTENBURY 183
CHAPTER XIV
THE WHISKY SMUGGLERS 201
CHAPTER XV
SOME SMUGGLERS’ TRICKS AND EVASIONS—MODERN 228
TOBACCO-SMUGGLING—SILKS AND LACE—A DOG DETECTIVE—LEGHORN
HATS—FOREIGN WATCHES
CHAPTER XVI
COAST BLOCKADE—THE PREVENTIVE WATER-GUARD AND THE 239
COASTGUARD—OFFICIAL RETURN OF SEIZURES—ESTIMATED LOSS TO THE
REVENUE IN 1831—THE SHAM SMUGGLER OF THE SEASIDE—THE MODERN
COASTGUARD
INDEX 249
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“The Gentlemen go by” _Frontispiece_.
PAGE
The Owlers 12
The Owlers chase the Customs Officers into Rye 16
Goudhurst Church 40
“The Cautious turned their Faces away while the 46
Freetraders passed”
Breaking open the Custom-house at Poole. _From an 48
old Print_
The “Red Lion,” Rake 54
Sufferings of Daniel Chater. _From an old Print_ 56
Murder of Hawkins at the “Dog and Partridge.” 64
_From an old Print_
The “Dog and Partridge,” Slindon Common 66
“For our Parson” 76
The Chop-backs 78
The Drummer of Herstmonceux 82
Tandridge Church 84
Tombstone at Tandridge 86
“Run the Rascal through!” 92
Barham meets the Smugglers 96
A Landing at Bo-Peep 98
Smugglers’ Tracks near Ewhurst 102
The Miller’s Tomb 104
Langston Harbour 106
Bedhampton Mill 110
The “Green Man,” Bradwell Quay 112
Kitchen of the “Green Man” 114
“The Light of other Days” 136
The Devils of Talland 144
Escape of Johnson 156
Johnson putting off from Brighton Beach 158
“Oft from yon bat-haunted tow’r” 168
Prussia Cove 170
In a French Prison 174
Jack Rattenbury. _From an old Print_ 184
Smugglers hiding Goods in a Tomb 214
Dragoons dispersing Smugglers 222
Smugglers attacked. _From a mezzo-tint after Sir 228
Francis Bourgeois_
Smugglers defeated. _From a mezzotint after Sir 234
Francis Bourgeois_
INTRODUCTORY
Customs dues and embargoes on imports and exports are things of
immemorial antiquity, the inevitable accompaniments of civilisation and
luxury; and the smugglers, who paid no dues and disregarded all
prohibitions, are therefore of necessity equally ancient. Carthage, the
chief commercial community of the ancient world, was probably as greatly
troubled by the questions of customs tariffs and smuggling as was the
England of George the Third. Without civilisation, and the consequent
demand for the products of other lands, the smuggler’s trade cannot
exist. In that highly organised condition of so-styled civilisation
which produces wars and race-hatreds and hostile tariffs and swollen
taxation, the smuggler becomes an important person, a hateful figure to
governments, but not infrequently a beneficent being to the
ill-provided—in all nations the most numerous class—to whom he brought,
at a reasonable price, and with much daring and personal risk, those
comforts which, when they had paid toll to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, were all but unattainable.
The chief defence, on the score of morals, set up by those few smugglers
who ever were at pains to prove that smuggling could be no crime, was
that customs duties were originally imposed in the time of Charles the
Second to provide funds for the protection of our coasts from the
Algerine and Barbary pirates who then occasionally adventured thus far
from their piratical lurks in the Mediterranean and ravaged the more
remote villages of our seaboard. When these dangers ceased, contended
these smugglers on their defence, the customs dues should automatically
have been taken off; but they were, on the contrary, greatly increased.
This view, or excuse, or defence—call it how we will—was, however,
entirely without historical foundation. It is true, indeed, that some
ports had been taxed, and that customs dues had been imposed for this
purpose, but customs charges were immemorially older than the seventeenth
century. There were probably such imposts in that lengthy era when
Britain was a Roman colony, and we certainly hear of customs charges
being levied in the reign of Ethelred, when a toll of one halfpenny was
charged upon every small boat arriving at Billingsgate, and one penny
upon larger boats, with sails.
These pages will show that not only import, but also export smuggling was
long continued in England, and not only so, but that the export
smuggling, notably that of wool, was for centuries the most important, if
not the only, kind. The prohibition of sending wool out of the kingdom
was, of course, introduced with the object of fostering the cloth
manufacture; but there are always two sides to any question, and in this
case the embargo upon wool soon taught the cloth-workers that, in the
matter of prices, they had the wool-growers at their mercy. By law they
could not sell to foreign customers, or (later) only upon paying heavy
dues; and the cloth-workers could therefore practically dictate their own
terms. In this pitiful resort—an example of the disastrous effect of
government interference with trade—there was nothing left but to set the
law at defiance, which the wool-growers and their allies, the “owlers,”
accordingly did, risking life and limb in the wholesale exportation of
wool. It is the duty of every citizen to oppose bad laws, but this
opposition to ill-conceived enactments creates a furtive class of men,
very Ishmaelites, who, with their liberty, and even their lives, forfeit,
are rendered capable, in extremity, of any and every enormity. Hence
arose those reckless bands of smugglers who in the middle of the
eighteenth century became highly organised and all-powerful in Kent,
Sussex, and Hampshire, and, realising their power, developed into
criminals of the most ferocious type. They were, properly regarded, the
products of bad government, the creatures brought into existence by a
vicious system that took its origin in the coming of William the Third,
the “Deliverer,” as history, tongue in cheek, styles him.
The growth of customs dues in the last years of the seventeenth century,
and so onward, in a vicious progression until the opening years of the
nineteenth, was not in any way owing to consideration for home traders,
or to a desire for the protection of British industries. They grew
exactly in proportion as the needs of the Government for revenue
increased; and were the direct results of that long-continued policy of
foreign alliances and aggressive interference in continental
politics—that “spirited foreign policy” advocated even in our own
times—which was introduced with the coming of William the Third. We did
well to depose James the Second, but we might have done better than bring
over his son-in-law and make him king; and we might, still more, have
done better than raise the Elector of Hanover to the status of British
sovereign, as George the First. Then we should probably have avoided
foreign entanglements, at any rate, until that later era when increased
intercourse between the nations rendered international politics
inevitable.
Foreign wars, and the heavy duties levied to pay for them, brought about
the enormous growth of smuggling, and directly caused all the miseries
and the blood-stained incidents that make the story of the smugglers so
“romantic.” Glory is very fine, and stirs the pulses in reading the
pages of history, but it is a commodity for which victorious nations, no
less than the defeated, are called upon to pay in blood, tears, and
privation.
With the great peace that, in 1815, succeeded the long and harassing
period of continual war, the people naturally looked forward towards a
time when the excessively heavy duties would be reduced, and many
articles altogether relieved from taxation. As a matter of fact, some of
these duties scarce paid the cost of their collection, and simply helped
to keep in office a large and increasing horde of officials. But the
price of glory continues to be paid, long after the laurels have faded;
and not for many years to come were those imposts reduced.
Sydney Smith, writing in 1820 on the subject of American desire for a
large navy, even then very manifest, warned the people of the United
States of the nemesis awaiting such indulgence. “We can inform
Jonathan,” he said, “what are the inevitable consequences of being too
fond of glory: Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or
covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which
it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth,
light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and the waters under
the earth; on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home;
taxes on the raw material, taxes on every fresh value that is added to it
by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man’s appetite
and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates
the judge and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man’s salt
and the rich man’s spice; on the brass nails of the coffin and the
ribands of the bride; at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay.
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed
horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman,
pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon that
has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which
has paid twenty-two per cent., makes his will on an eight-pound stamp,
and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of a
hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole
property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the
probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his
virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then
gathered to his fathers—to be taxed no more.”
The real cost of military glory was aptly shown by a caricaturist of this
period, who illustrated the general rise of prices consequent upon war in
the following incident of an old country-woman buying a halfpenny candle
at a chandler’s shop:
“Price has gone up,” said the shopkeeper curtly, when she tendered the
money.
“What’s that for, then?” asked the old woman.
“On account of the war, ma’am.”
“Od rot ’em! do they fight by candlelight?” she not unnaturally asked.
Housekeepers of the present day may well enter—although somewhat
ruefully—into the humour of this simple story, for in the great and
continued rise of every commodity since the great Boer War, it is most
poignantly illustrated for us. In short, the people who pay for the
glory see nothing of it, and derive nothing from it.
How entirely true were those witty phrases of Sydney Smith we may easily
guess from the mere rough statement that there were, in 1787, no fewer
than 1,425 articles liable to duty (very many of them taxed at several
times their market value), bringing in £6,000,000 a year.
In 1797 the customs laws filled six large folio volumes. The total
number of Customs Acts prior to the accession of George the Third was
800, but no fewer than 1,300 were added between the years 1760 and 1813,
and newer Acts, partly repealing and partly adding to older enactments,
were continually being added to this vast mass of chaotic legislation
down to the middle of the Victorian era, until even experts were
frequently baffled as to the definite legal position of many given
articles. Finally—it is typical of our English amateur way of doing
things—in 1876, when so-called “Free Trade” had come in, and few articles
remained customable, the customs laws were consolidated.
Many years before, at one swoop, Sir Robert Peel had removed the duties
from four hundred different dutiable articles, leaving, however, many
hundreds of others more or less heavily assessed.
In consequence of this relief from taxation, smuggling rapidly decreased,
and the Commissioners of Customs were enabled to report: “With the
reduction of duties, and the removal of all needless and vexatious
restrictions, smuggling has greatly diminished, and the public sentiment
with regard to it has undergone a very considerable change. The smuggler
is no longer an object of general sympathy, as a hero of romance; and
people are beginning to awaken to a perception of the fact that his
offence is not only a fraud on the revenue, but a robbery of the fair
trader. Smuggling is now almost entirely confined to tobacco, spirits,
and watches.”
No fewer than four hundred and fifty other dutiable articles were struck
off the list in 1845, and the Cobdenite era of Free Trade, to which, it
was expected, all other nations would speedily be converted, had opened.
“Free Trade,” we are told, “killed smuggling.” It naturally killed
smuggling so far as duty-free articles were concerned; but this
all-embracing term of “Free Trade” is altogether a mockery and a
delusion. There has never been—there is not now—complete Free Trade in
this so-called free-trade country. Wines and spirits, tobacco, tea and
coffee, cocoa and sugar, are not they in the forefront of the articles
that render regularly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? There have
been, indeed, throughout all the years of the Free Trade era, some forty
articles scheduled for paying customs duty on import into the United
Kingdom. They help the revenue to the extent of about £27,000,000 per
annum.
The romance of smuggling has very largely engaged the attention of every
description of writers, but we do not hear so much of its commercial
aspects, although it must be evident that for men to dare so greatly as
the smugglers did with winds and waves and with the customs’ forces, the
possible gains must have been great. Time and again a cargo of tea or of
spirits would be seized, and yet the smugglers be prepared with other
ventures, knowing, as they did, that one entirely successful run would
pay for perhaps two failures. When tea could be purchased in Holland at
sevenpence a pound, and sold in England at prices ranging from 3_s._
6_d._ to 5_s._, and when tobacco, purchased at the same price, sold at
2_s._ 6_d._, it is evident that great possibilities existed for the
enterprising free-trader.
As regards spirits, if we take brandy as an example, we find almost equal
profits; for excellent cognac was shipped from Roscoff, in Brittany, from
Cherbourg, Dieppe, and other French ports in tubs of four gallons each,
which cost in France £1 a tub, and sold in England at £4. One of the
ordinary smuggling luggers, generally built especially for this traffic,
on racing lines, would hold eighty tubs.
On such a cargo being brought, according to preconcerted plan, within
easy distance off-shore, generally at night, a lantern or other signal
shown from cliff or beach by confederates on land would indicate the
precise spot where the goods were most safely to be beached; and there
would be assembled a sufficient company of labourers engaged for the job.
A cargo of eighty tubs required forty men, who carried two each, slung by
ropes over chest and back. According to circumstances, they marched in
company on foot, inland; or, if the distance were great, they went on
horseback, each man with a led horse, carrying three or four tubs in
addition. These labourers, although not finally interested in the safe
running of the goods, and not paid on any other basis than being hired
for the heavy job of carrying considerable weights throughout the night,
were quite ready and willing to fight any opponents that might be met, as
innumerable accounts of savage encounters tell us. Besides these
carriers, there were often, in case of opposition to the landing being
anticipated, numerous “batsmen,” armed with heavy clubs, to protect the
goods.
The pay of a labourer or carrier varied widely, of course, in different
places, at different times, and according to circumstances. It ranged
from five shillings to half a sovereign a night, and generally included
also a present of a package of tea or a tub of brandy for so many
successful runs. It is recorded that the labourers engaged for riding
horseback, each with a led horse, from Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Folkestone,
or Romney, to Canterbury, a distance of some fifteen miles, were paid
seven shillings a night. The horses cost the smugglers nothing, for they
were commandeered, as a general rule, from the neighbouring farmers, who
did not usually offer any objection, for it was not often that the gangs
forgot to leave a tub in payment. The method employed in thus
requisitioning horses was quite simple. An unsigned note would be handed
to a farmer stating that his horses were wanted, for some purpose
unnamed, on a certain night; and that he was desired to leave his stables
unlocked for those who would come and fetch them. If he did not comply
with this demand he very soon had cause to regret it in the mysterious
disasters that would shortly afterwards overtake him: his outbuildings
being destroyed by fire, his farming implements smashed, or his cattle
mutilated.
The farmers, indeed, were somewhat seriously embarrassed by the
prevalence of smuggling. On the one hand, they had to lend their horses
for the smugglers’ purposes, and on the other they discovered that the
demand for carriers of tubs and other goods shortened the supply of
labour available for agricultural purposes, and sent up the rate of
wages. A labourer in the pay of smugglers would often be out three
nights in the week, and, with the money he received and with additional
payment in kind, was in a very comfortable position.
CHAPTER I
THE “OWLERS” OF ROMNEY MARSH, AND THE ANCIENT EXPORT SMUGGLING OF WOOL
THE earliest conflicts of interests between smugglers and the Government
were concerned with the export of goods, and not with imports. We are
accustomed to think only of the import smuggler, who brought from across
Channel, or from more distant shores, the spirits, wines, tea, coffee,
silks, laces, and tobacco that had never yielded to the revenue of the
country; but before him in point of time, if not also in importance, was
the “owler” who, defying all prohibitions and penalties, even to those of
bodily mutilation and death, sold wool out of England and secretly
shipped it at night from the shores of Kent and Sussex.
English wool had from a very early date been greatly in demand on the
Continent. The England of those distant times was a purely agricultural
country, innocent of arts, industries, and manufactures, except of the
most primitive description. The manufacturers then exercised their
skilled trades largely in France and the Low Countries; and, in especial,
the cloth-weaving industries were practised in Flanders.
[Picture: The Owlers]
So early as the reign of Edward the First the illegal exportation of wool
engaged the attention of the authorities, and an export duty of £3 a bag
(in modern money) was imposed, soon after 1276. This was in 1298
increased to £6 a bag, then lowered, and then again raised. English wool
was then worth 1_s._ 6_d._ a pound.
In the reign of Edward the Third a strenuous attempt was made to
introduce the weaving industries into England, and every inducement was
offered the Flemish weavers to settle here and to bring their art with
them. In support of this policy, the export of wool was, in various
years, subjected to further restrictions, and at one time entirely
forbidden. The royal solicitude for the newly cradled English weaving
industries also in 1337 forbade the wearing of clothing made with cloth
woven out of the country; but it is hardly necessary to add that edicts
of this stringency were constantly broken; and in 1341 Winchelsea,
Chichester, and thirteen other ports were named, whence wool might be
exported, on payment of a duty of 50_s._ a sack of twenty-six
stone—_i.e._ 364 lb.
The interferences with the sale and export of wool continued, and the
duty was constantly being raised or lowered, according to the supposed
needs of the time; but nearly always with unforeseen and disastrous
effects. The wool staple was removed to the then English possession of
Calais in 1363, and the export of it absolutely forbidden elsewhere. The
natural result, in spite of the great amount of smuggling carried on, was
that in a long series of years the value of wool steadily fell; the
cloth-makers taking advantage of the accumulation of stocks on the
growers’ hands to depress the price. In 1390 the growers had from three
to five seasons’ crops on hand, and the state of the industry had become
such that in the following year permission to export generally, on
payment of duty, was conceded. This duty tended to become gradually
heavier, and, as it increased, so proportionably did the “owling” trade.
The price of wool therefore declined again, and in 1454 it was recorded
as being not more than two-thirds of what it had been a hundred and ten
years earlier. The wool-growers, on the brink of ruin, petitioned that
wool, according to its various grades, might not be sold under certain
fixed prices; which were accordingly fixed.
But to follow, _seriatim_, the movements in prices and the complete
reversals of Government policy regarding the export, would be wearisome.
We will, therefore, pass on to the Restoration of the monarchy, in 1660,
when the export of wool was again entirely forbidden. Smuggling of it
was in 1662 again, by the reactionary laws of the period, made a felony,
punishable with death; yet the active smugglers, the rank and file of the
owling trade, who performed the hard manual labour for wages, at the
instigation of those financially interested, continued to risk their
necks for twelvepence a day. The low price their services commanded is
alone sufficient to show us that labour, in spite of the risks, was
plentiful. Not only Kent and Sussex, but Essex, and Ireland as well,
largely entered into this secret “stealing of wool out of the country,”
as the phrase ran; and “these caterpillars” had so many evasions, and
commanded so many combinations and interests among those officials whose
business it was to detect and punish, that few dared interfere: hence the
readiness of the labourers to “risk their necks,” the risk being, under
the circumstances, small.
Indeed, readers of the adventures of these owling desperadoes and of the
customs officers who hunted them will, perhaps, come to the conclusion
that the risks on either side were pretty evenly apportioned, and they
will see that the hunters not seldom became the hunted.
The experiences of one W. Carter, who appears to have been in authority
over the customs staff in the Romney Marsh district, towards the close of
the seventeenth century, were at times singularly vivid. His particular
“hour of crowded life” came in 1688, while he was engaged in an attempt
to arrest a body of owlers who were shipping wool into some French
shallops between Folkestone and New Romney.
Having procured the necessary warrants, he repaired to Romney, where he
seized eight or ten men who were carrying the wool on their horses’ backs
to be shipped, and desired the Mayor of Romney to commit them, but,
greatly to the surprise of this zealous officer, who doubtless imagined
he had at last laid some of these desperate fellows securely by the
heels, the Mayor of Romney consented to the prisoners being admitted to
bail. Mr. Carter, to have been so ingenuously surprised, must have been
a singularly simple official, or quite new to the business; for what
Mayor of Romney in those days, when every one on the Marsh smuggled, or
was interested financially in the success of smuggling, would dare not
deal leniently with these fellows! Nay, it was even abundantly probable
that the Mayor himself was financially committed in these ventures, and
perhaps even among the employers of Mr. Carter’s captives.
Romney was no safe abiding-place for Carter and his underlings when these
men were enlarged; and they accordingly retired upon Lydd. But if they
had fondly expected peace and shelter there they were woefully mistaken,
for a Marshland cry of vengeance was raised, and a howling mob of owlers,
ululating more savagely than those melancholy birds from whom they took
their name, violently attacked them in that little town, under cover of
night. The son of the Mayor of Lydd, well disposed to these sadly
persecuted revenue men, advised them to further retire upon Rye, which
they did the next morning, December 13th, pursued hotly across the
dyke-intersected marshes, as far as Camber Point, by fifty furious men.
[Picture: The Owlers chase the Customs Officers into Rye]
At Guilford Ferry the pursuers were so close upon their heels that they
had to hurriedly dismount and tumble into some boats belonging to ships
lying near, leaving their horses behind; and so they came safe, but
breathless, into Rye town.
At this period Calais—then lost to England—alone imported within two
years 40,000 packs of wool from Kent and Sussex; and the Romney Marsh men
not only sold their own wool in their illicit manner, but bought other
from up-country, ten or twenty miles inland, and impudently shipped it
off.
In 1698, the severe laws of some thirty years earlier having been thus
brought into contempt, milder penal enactments were introduced, but more
stringent conditions than ever were imposed upon the collection and
export of this greatly vexed commodity, and the civil deterrents of
process and fine, aimed at the big men in the trade, were strengthened.
A law was enacted (9 & 10 William the Third, c. 40, ss. 2 and 3) by which
no person living within fifteen miles of the sea in the counties of Kent
and Sussex should buy any wool before he became responsible in a legal
bond, with sureties, that none of the wool he should buy should be sold
by him to any persons within fifteen miles of the sea; and growers of
wool in those counties, within ten miles of the coast, were obliged,
within three days of shearing, to account for the number of fleeces
shorn, and to state where they were stored.
The success of this new law was not at first very marked, for the means
of enforcing it had not been provided. To enact repressive edicts, and
not to provide the means of their being respected, was as unsatisfactory
as fighting the wind. The Government, viewing England as a whole,
appointed under the new Act seventeen surveyors for nineteen counties,
with 299 riding-officers: a force barely sufficient for Kent and Sussex
alone. It cost £20,000 a year, and never earned its keep.
Henry Baker, supervisor for Kent and Sussex, writing on April 25th, 1699,
to his official chiefs, stated that there would be shorn in Romney Marsh,
quite apart from the adjacent levels of Pett, Camber, Guilford, and Dunge
Marsh, about 160,000 sheep, whose fleeces would amount to some three
thousand packs of wool, “the greatest part whereof will immediately be
sent off hot into France—it being so designed, preparations in great
measure being already made for that purpose.”
In fact, the new law at first did nothing more than to give the owlers
some extra trouble and expense in cartage of their packs; for, in order
to legally evade the extra disabilities it imposed, it was only necessary
to cart them fifteen miles inland and make fictitious sale and re-sale of
them there; thence shipping them as they pleased.
By this time the exportation of wool had become not only a kingly
concern—it had aroused the keen interest of the nation at large, fast
becoming an industrial and cloth-weaving nation. For two centuries and
more past the cloth-workers had been growing numerous, wealthy, and
powerful, and they meant, as far as it was possible for them to do, to
starve the continental looms out of the trade, for sheer lack of
material. No one cared in the least about the actual grower of the wool,
whether he made a loss or a profit on his business. It is obvious that
if export of it could have been wholly stopped, the cloth-workers, in the
forced absence of foreign buyers, would have held the unfortunate growers
in the hollow of their hands, and would have been able to dictate the
price of wool.
It is the inalienable right of every human being to fight against unjust
laws; only we must be sure they are unjust. Perhaps the dividing-line,
when self-interest is involved, is not easily to be fixed. But there can
be no doubt that the wool-growers were labouring under injustice, and
that they were entirely justified in setting those laws at naught which
menaced their existence.
However, by December 1703, Mr. Baker was able to give his superiors a
more favourable report. He believed the neck of the owling trade to have
been broken and the spirit of the owlers themselves to have been crushed,
particularly in Romney Marsh. There were not, at that time, he observed,
“many visible signs” of any quantities of wool being exported: which
seems to us rather to point to the perfected organisation of the owling
trade than to its being crushed out of existence.
“But for fine goods,” continued the supervisor, “as they call them
(_viz._ silks, lace, etc.), I am well assured that the trade goes on
through both counties, though not in such vast quantities as have been
formerly brought in—I mean in those days when (as a gentleman of estate
in one of the counties has within this twelve months told me) he has been
att once, besides at other times, at the loading of a wagon with silks,
laces, etc., till six oxen could hardly move it out of the place. I doe
not think that the trade is now so carried on as ’twas then.”
Things being so promising in the purview of this simple person, it seemed
well to him to suggest to the Commissioners of the Board of Customs that
a reduction of the annual charge of £4,500 for the preventive service
along the coasts of Kent and Sussex might be effected. At that time
there were fifty preventive officers patrolling over two hundred miles of
seaboard, each in receipt of £60 per annum, and each provided with a
servant and a horse, to help in night duty, at an estimated annual cost
of £30 for each officer.
We may here legitimately pause in surprise at the small pay for which
these men were ready to endure the dangers and discomforts of such a
service; very real perils and most unmistakable disagreeables, in midst
of an almost openly hostile country-side.
Mr. Baker, sanguine man that he was, proposed to abolish the annual
allowance to each of these hard-worked men for servant and horse, thus
saving £1,500 a year, and to substitute for them patrols of the Dragoon
regiments at that time stationed in Kent. These regiments had been
originally placed there in 1698 to overawe the owlers and other
smugglers, the soldiers being paid twopence extra a day (which certainly
did not err upon the side of extravagance) and the officers in
proportion: the annual cost on that head amounting to £200 per annum.
This military stiffening of the civil force employed to prevent
clandestine export and import appears to have been discontinued in 1701,
after about two years’ experiment.
These revived patrols, at a cost of £200, the supervisor calculated,
would more efficiently and economically undertake the work hitherto
performed by the preventive officers’ horses and men, still leaving a
saving of £1,300 a year. With this force, and a guard of cruisers
offshore, he was quite convinced that the smuggling of these parts would
still be kept under.
But alas for these calculations! The economy thus effected on this
scheme, approved of and put into being, was altogether illusory. The
owling trade, of which the supervisor had supposed the neck to be broken,
flourished more impudently than before. The Dragoons formed a most
inefficient patrol, and worked ill with the revenue officers, and, in
short, the Revenue lost annually many more thousands of pounds sterling
than it saved hundreds. When sheriffs and under-sheriffs could be, and
were, continually bribed, it is not to be supposed that Dragoons,
thoroughly disliking such an inglorious service as that of chasing
smugglers along muddy lanes and across country intricately criss-crossed
with broad dykes rarely to be jumped, would be superior to secret
advances that gave them much more than their miserable twopence a day.
Transportation for wool-smugglers who did not pay the fines awarded
against them was enacted in 1717; ineffectually, for in 1720 it was found
necessary to issue a proclamation, enforcing the law; and in five
successive years from 1731 the cloth-workers are found petitioning for
greater vigilance against the continued clandestine exportation, alleging
a great decay in the woollen manufactures owing to this illegal export;
150,000 packs being shipped yearly. “It is feared,” said these
petitioners, fighting for their own hand, regardless, of course, of other
interests, “that some gentlemen of no mean rank, whose estates border on
the sea-coast, are too much influenced by a near, but false, prospect of
gain”: to which the gentlemen in question, being generally brought up on
the dead classic languages, might most fairly have replied, had they
cared to do so, with the easy Latinity of _Tu quoque_!
This renewed daring and enterprise of the Sussex smugglers led to many
encounters with the customs officers. Among these was the desperate
engagement between sixty armed smugglers and customs men at Ferring, on
June 21st, 1720, when William Goldsmith, of the Customs, had his horse
shot under him.
A humorous touch, so far at least as the modern reader of these things is
concerned, is found in the Treasury warrant issued about this time, for
the sum of £200, for supplying a regiment with new boots and stockings;
their usual allowance of these indispensable articles having been “worn
out in the pursuit of smugglers.”
In spite of all attempts to suppress these illegal activities, it had to
be acknowledged, in the preamble of an Act passed in 1739, that the
export of wool was “notoriously continued.”
The old-established owling trade of Romney Marsh at length, after many
centuries, gave place to the clandestine import of silks, tea, spirits,
and tobacco; but it was only by slow and insensible degrees that the
owlers’ occupation dwindled away, in the lessening foreign demand for
English wool. The last was not heard of this more than
five-centuries-old question of the export of wool, that had so severely
exercised the minds of some twenty generations, and had baffled the
lawgivers in all that space of time, until the concluding year of the
final wars with France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many other articles were at the same time forbidden to be exported; among
them Fuller’s-earth, used in the manufacture of cloth, and so, of course,
subject to the same interdict as wool. A comparatively late Exchequer
trial for the offence of exporting Fuller’s-earth was that of one Edmund
Warren, in 1693. Fortunately for the defendant, he was able to show that
what he had exported was not Fuller’s-earth at all, but potter’s clay.