The Smugglers: Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient Craft

Marsh, and the Ancient

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 imp

tural country, innocent of arts, industries, and manufactures, except of the most primitive description. The manufacturers then exercise

thorities, and an export duty of ￡3 a bag (in modern money) was imposed, soon after 1276. This was in 129

ol 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

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 t

what it had been a hundred and ten years earlier. The wool-growers, on the brink of ruin, petitioned that woo

ctive 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,

who hunted them will, perhaps, come to the conclusion that the risks on either side were p

the close of the seventeenth century, were at times singularly vivid. His particular "hour of crowded life" came in 1688, while he wa

d 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

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, w

hurriedly dismount and tumble into some boats belonging to ships lying near, le

from Kent and Sussex; and the Romney Marsh men not only sold their own wool in their illicit man

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, tha

e 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

t 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, "

of their packs; for, in order to legally evade the extra disabilities it imposed, it was only necessary to cart t

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 hi

e dividing-line, when self-interest is involved, is not easily to be fixed. But there can be no doubt that the wool-growers wer

he 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 qu

tities 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 a

harge 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 hundre

ready to endure the dangers and discomforts of such a service; very real perils and

oned 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

work hitherto performed by the preventive officers' horses and men, still leaving a saving of ￡1,300 a year. With this fo

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

inst 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

officers. Among these was the desperate engagement between sixty armed smugglers and customs men at

ry warrant issued about this time, for the sum of ￡200, for supplying a regiment with new boots and stockin

, it had to be acknowledged, in the preamble of an Act passed

hat 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

se, subject to the same interdict as wool. A comparatively late Exchequer trial for the offence of exporting Fuller's-earth was that of one Edmu