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

e Hawkhurst Gang-Organised Attack

isation of the smugglers, from the master-men to the labourers, more nearly perfect. To interfere with any of the several confederacies into which these men were banded for the furtherance of their illicit trade was therefore a matter of considerable danger, and, well knowing the terror into which they had thrown the country-side, they presumed upon it, to extend

, for those times, a grand scale, and was said to be worth ￡10,000. He had built on that then lonely ridge of ground, overlooking at a great height the Weald of Kent, large store houses-a kind of illicit "bonded warehouses"-for smuggled goods, and made the spot a distributing centre. That all these facts should have been contemporaneously known, and Gray's store not have been raided by the Revenue, points to an almost inconceivable state of lawlessness. The buildings w

They wounded the officer and carried the four off to Hawkhurst, where they tied two of them, who had formerly been smugglers and had ratted to the customs servi

lve or fourteen smugglers assaulted three custom-house officers whom they found in an alehouse at

wool, valued at ￡1,500. A week later ￡300 worth of wool, which may or may not have been a portion of t

nt and Sussex eventually found themselves dominated by a great number of fearless marauders, whose will for a time was a greater law than the law of the land. None coul

The villagers and the farmers round about were wearied of having their horses commandeered by mysterious strangers for the carrying of contraband goods that

their lawless inroads. The second alternative was chosen; a paper expressive of their abhorrence of the conduct of the smugglers, and of the determination to oppose them was drawn up and subscribed to by a considerable number of

and, by means of torture and imprisonment, extorted from him a full disclosure of the plans and intentions of his colleagues. They swore the man not to take up arms against them,

e danger of the situation, employed them in earnest preparations. While some were sent to collec

and fired a volley into the village, over the entrenchments made. The embattled villagers replied, some from the houses and roof-tops, and others from the leads of the church-tower; when G

whose name is not mentioned, were killed and several wounded. The rest then fled, pursued by the v

think it-extraordinary incident. A stray paragraph or so in the chronicles of the time

to hear wild and whirling accounts of this famous event; and, if he be at all enterprising, will find in

gsmill, Dux sclerum gland

hrined, amid much fiction, in the pages

y swaggering smugglers rode, well-armed and reckless, into Rye and halted at th

old account of these things concludes, "observing James Marshall, a young man, to

man; but, from other accounts of the bloodthirsty characters of

captured two revenue officers near Seaford, and, securely pinning them down to the beach at low-wate

smuggler named Austin, violently resisting arrest, s

ans was, as we have already seen, an offence, and the most cautious among the rustics made quite sure of not incurring their high displeasure-and incidentally of not being called upon by the revenue authorities as witnesses to the identity of any among their number-b

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