After the revolution of 1688, the penalty of felony, imposed by the Act of Charles II., was thought too severe. Very few convictions had taken place under it; and, in 1698, a milder punishment was inflicted;[46] whilst, in 1698, a direct blow was aimed at the Kent and Sussex men by an enactment which lasted till our own day,[47] that no person living within fifteen miles of the sea, in those counties, should buy any wool before he entered into a bond, with sureties, that all the wool he should buy should not be sold by him to any persons within fifteen miles of the sea; and growers of wool within ten miles of the sea, in those counties, were obliged, within three days of shearing, to account for the number of fleeces, and where lodged.
All the care of the Legislature had been to no purpose; the coast men had set the law at defiance—openly carrying their wool at shearing-time, on horses’ backs to the seashore, where French vessels were ready to receive it—and attacking fiercely anyone who ventured to interfere. Mr. W. Carter himself was sharply attacked in 1688. Having procured the necessary warrants, he repaired to Romney Marsh, where he seized eight or ten men, who were carrying the wool on the horses’ backs to be shipped, and desired the Mayor of Romney to commit them. The Mayor—wishing, no doubt, to live a peaceful life among his neighbours—admitted them to bail. Carter and his assistants retired to Lydd, but that town was made too hot to hold them—they were attacked at night; adopting the advice of the Mayor’s son, they next day, December 13, came towards Rye. They were pursued by some fifty armed horsemen till they got to Camber Point; so fast were they followed, that they could not get their horses over Guilford Ferry; but, luckily, some ships’ boats gave them assistance, so that the riders got safe into the town, which had been “put into much fear;” and “had they not got into the boats,” says one of the witnesses, “Mr. Carter would have received some hurt, for many of the exporters were desperate fellows, not caring what mischief they did.”[48]
The new law was not, at first, much more efficient. Mr. Henry Baker, the supervisor of these counties, writing on his tour from Hastings, on September 18, 1698, refers the customs department to some observations he had made in relation to the “owling”[49] and smuggling trades; and in his letter of April 25, 1699, he states that in a few weeks there would be shorn in Romney Marsh (besides the adjacent parts in the level) about 160,000 sheep, whose fleeces would amount to about three thousand packs of wool, “the greatest part whereof will be immediately sent off hot into France—it being so designed, and provisions, in a great measure, already made for that purpose.”[50] All that the new law seems to have done at first was to send the wool grown by the Sussex and Kent men some fifteen miles up the country, to be thence recarried to the sea and shipped.
Under the new act, seventeen surveyors were appointed for nineteen counties; and 299 riding officers, whose salaries and expenses came to £20,000 a year. They seized only 457 packs of wool, got only 162 packs condemned, and had 504 packs rescued. In Kent, sixty-five packs were seized and eight only condemned; in Sussex, twenty-six were seized, and twelve condemned.[51]
The illicit exportation of wool was never stopped; and, in 1702, Mr. William Symonds, of Milton, near Gravesend, in his “New Year’s Gift to the Parliament: or, England’s Golden Fleece preserved, in Proposals humbly laid before the Present Parliament,”[52] makes twenty-five proposals to prevent the exportation of wool, which was illicitly carried on to a great extent; and, by the first, he suggests six staples, or registry offices, at Ashford, Faversham, Maidstone, Tunbridge, Gravesend, and Dartford, for the prevention of clandestine export from these places.
In 1717, an act passed, directing that smugglers of wool, who should be in prison, and should not plead, might have judgment against them, and, if they did not pay the penalty, might be transported;[53] and yet, on May 19, 1720, it was necessary to issue a proclamation for enforcing the law.
In 1731, and in the five following years, the manufacturers petitioned for greater vigilance against the clandestine exportation of wool; it being alleged that the great decay of the woollen manufactures was, beyond dispute, owing to the illegal exportation of wool, of which 150,000 packs were supposed to be shipped yearly; and it was “feared that some gentlemen of no mean rank, whose estates bordered on the seacoast, were too much influenced by a near but false prospect of gain,” to wish for the application of a remedy proposed, viz., the registration of all wool at shearing-time, and a complete system of certificates till it was manufactured; “so that no smuggler or owler would venture to purchase it, by reason he would have no opportunity of sending it abroad in the dark.”[54]
In the preamble to the Act of 1739,[55] it is expressly avowed that, notwithstanding the penalties imposed for eighty years, the exportation of wool, unmanufactured, was “notoriously continued.” The stringent law of 1698 had failed in its object, and when, in 1787 (in opposition to the demands of the Lincolnshire wool-growers for power to export their produce), the manufacturers brought in a bill to prevent the illicit exportation, because of the then increasing practice of smuggling British wool into France, and the inefficiency of the laws to prevent it; and when, as a remedy, it was proposed to extend the restrictions imposed upon Kent and Sussex to the entire kingdom, the opponents of the bill shrewdly asked:—“How it was the manufacturers could act so absurdly, to demand an extension of laws relating to those two counties, when it was supposed that the greatest quantities of wool were smuggled from those parts?”[56]
The habit of export smuggling, then, has been, for some hundreds of years at least, part of the system under which the middle and lower classes in Sussex have been trained. Large fortunes were made by it in East Sussex, and it came to an end only during the last war with France.