And indeed this will be as good a place as any to say something of smuggling, popularly regarded in the retrospect as a picturesque sort of game in which high and low took a hand.
That is true, in a sense, but the former as a rule took pretty good care of themselves and shared only the plunder, while the more active agents in the trade, certainly in the eighteenth century, who took the risks, were quite often reckless desperadoes, and occasionally as vengeful and cruel as any agrarian ruffian in Mayo or Clare. The rank and file of the service were drawn from the country labourers who were ready to risk their necks - an off-chance risk to be sure - for a few shillings a job.
But there were two altogether different branches of smuggling, belonging in broad figures to two distinct periods. Firstly, the illegal export of wool, known as " owling," in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; and, secondly, the import of spirits, tea, lace, and silk in later days.
It is this last one has generally in mind when the contraband trade is referred to. For one thing it was nearer our time, more melodramatic, and incidentally more immoral and blackguardly. Moreover, we still tax these articles for revenue, and with universal approval. But though the export of wool, which was rigorously forbidden or very heavily taxed, through the centuries mentioned and a little later was often for the general good of the country, it was sometimes hard on the
wool growers to be at the mercy of the Home manufacturers. It is not surprising that they fancied themselves sacrificed to the community, and illegally sought the much higher and more profitable markets of the Continent.
But whichever way it went, it was quite a different matter from smuggling brandy for profit into a country which already lacked nothing for alcoholic drinks; though indeed wool smuggling at some periods so raised the home prices that bitter and justifiable complaints came from the manufacturers of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Essex, the chief centres of the trade from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.
Whether in smuggling wool out, or brandy and tea in, no part of England was so continually active throughout all the centuries as the coast between Hythe and Hastings, not even the other sea fronts of Kent and Sussex, which came in a very close second. All our coasts are more or less rich in smuggling traditions, but on this one here, being both close to the Continent, thinly populated, handy for landing goods and favourable for escaping pursuit, smuggling was bitten into the very bone of the people.
It is hardly too much to say that it was for a long time the chief trade of the country. The number of snug little fortunes acquired, and the prosperous families that flourished within sound of the sea are themselves a contradiction in terms to the steadily silting-up harbours and the prolonged cry of despair at shrinking trade, which wails through the records of every little port for more than three hundred years.
The clip and increase of a hundred thousand or so Romney Marsh sheep, at home prices, and the trade of Romney, Lydd, Rye, Winchelsea and Hastings, from the Tudors to Victoria, can hardly be stretched to account for all these pretty little nest eggs. Nor was it only the double and triple price obtained on the Continent for so much of the Marsh clip that made for all this comfort. Wool was consigned from all sorts of places to the edge of the Marsh and there taken in hand for free export by these master craftsmen in the smuggling art, and frequent Acts were passed regulating the local purchase of wool on this account. It was not all done by stealth, however, for brute force was constantly employed; one or two hundred armed men being frequently engaged in openly conveying both exports and imports, and either fighting or intimidating by mere numbers the guardians of the King's revenues.
These last were generally less than one hundred and fifty in number on the whole of the Kent and Sussex coast in the early eighteenth century! They had a hard time these men, and were not over paid, and furthermore were liable to private actions at law if they made mistakes, not always avoidable in the sea-going part of the service, which had to overhaul vessels on bare suspicion.
The Preventive force was sometimes supplemented by dragoons, and much use
they must have been in a
country intersected by a network of deep and broad dykes, that even the
headiest native horseman following the hounds does not attempt to jump,
but steers his knowing way for the bridges as the smuggler of old steered
his, in the dark of the night.
"Owling" declined in the eighteenth century, owing mainly to the shrinkage in Continental prices and partly no doubt to the frequent wars with France. Brandy and "soft goods" from France, tea and gin from Holland, then took the lead. Great numbers of horses were used in the trade, both those of the parties interested, and those commandeered from the stables of farmers, parsons or squires, a "tub" being usually left in the stable as payment.
But whether or not the liberty was taken as a matter of course, for sympathy with smuggling was pretty general, while those who denounced it got none whatever. In the mid-eighteenth century intimidation reigned supreme. Magistrates hesitated to arrest lest they should be burned out of house and home. Juries failed to convict on the clearest evidence from mixed reasons, till the 'Venue', as in Ireland, had often to be shifted, while informers or even mere innocent bearers of letters to active magistrates, were ruthlessly murdered, and sometimes with horrible atrocity.
The too sympathetic public awoke to find itself living under a veritable reign of terror, in the shape of gangs of desperadoes who, though smugglers in the first instance, included robbery and murder in their programme.
Read 'The Beginning of the end' of the Smuggling Gangs here
Extract from 'An Old Gate of England', by A.G.Bradley, 1917
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