The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

This warden of the coasts was not ill provided with fortresses. There were, in all, nine. In addition to Regulbium and Rutupiæ, there was the like defence of Garianonum, now known as Burgh Castle, near Yarmouth; Branodunum, Brancaster in Norfolk; Othona, now known as St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, near Bradwell, Essex; the original castle at Dover, Portus Lemanis, now Lympne; Anderida, Pevensey; and Portus Adurni. The fortunes of the various Counts of the Saxon Shore are unknown. All records are lost in the final overthrow of civilisation after the departure of the Romans, and when the conquering Saxons had established themselves here, they were strong enough for a long time to hold what they had made their own, without the necessity for vigilant defence of the coast. It was only when the Saxons, in their turn, had begun to feel the effects of ease and luxury, and when they, too, had suffered from piratical rovers, that coast-defence again became urgent. And the protection of our shores has been, more or less, a matter of urgency ever since, and so remains.

But not until the time of Edward the Confessor did the actual confederation of the Cinque Ports come into existence, and not until after the Conquest do we hear with any certainty of it. It is not clear, amid the mists of antiquity from which this history emerges, whether the ports concerned took the initiative or whether the duty of providing ships and men for the King’s use (or for national defence, as we might nowadays express it) was laid upon them against their will. But the privileges and exemptions granted to these associated ports in return for their supply of ships, men, and munitions amply recouped the cost of the service imposed upon them. The original Cinque Ports were Dover, Sandwich, Hastings, Hythe, and Romney. At a later period Rye and Winchelsea were added, under the special designation of the “Ancient Towns.” Each port had its subsidiary “members.” Thus the “members” attached to Dover were Margate, Folkestone, Faversham, and St. Peter’s, Broadstairs. Those belonging to Sandwich were Deal, Walmer, Stonar, Ramsgate, Sarre, Reculver, Fordwich, and Brightlingsea, away in Essex; to which Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Dunwich in Suffolk may perhaps be added, although Dunwich was early swept away by encroachment of the sea, and Yarmouth, as a place of considerable size, fully conscious of its own dignity, always resented the authority assumed by Sandwich over its fishery, and eventually, in 1663, won its complete independence.

Romney comprised Lydd, Dungeness, Eastweston, and Promwell; Hythe took in merely West Hythe, and to Hastings belonged the remote and completely inland village of Bekesbourne.

The story of the Cinque Ports is, above all else, an object-lesson in the supreme, although generally unacknowledged, importance of the trading, or middle classes, without whose enterprising activities and courage and resource the nation long since would have ceased to exist. It has always been convenient to ignore the services to the community performed by traders, who on the one hand give employment and on the other pay the greater proportion of rates and taxes, and from whose enriched families the failing and impoverished aristocracy has throughout the centuries been recruited.

Although, as already said, the idea of the Cinque Ports confederation goes back into dim antiquity, we have few early facts. The first Warden of whom we have any certain information is John de Fiennes, in the time of William the Conqueror, and the earliest charter extant is that of 1277, the sixth year of the reign of Edward the First. By that document we learn something of the status and scope of this remarkable association. Those ports were among the richest communities at that time within the kingdom. They no longer suffered, as of yore, from pirates, although they were the first to feel the vengeance of the foreigner when war broke out; and thus they were not so immediately concerned as of old in guarding their own shores. But the King in those times, before such a thing as a royal navy had come into existence, had need of ships wherewith to conduct his foreign wars, and the merchant-vessels of Sandwich, of Dover, and of these other maritime communities were the only craft then available. Not even in those high-handed feudal times was it possible to seize ships at will; some centuries earlier a compact had been made with the ports, which were then definitely associated. They undertook to supply vessels, according to their relative importance. Thus under Henry the Third, in 1229, the Cinque Ports, as a whole, were to furnish fifty-seven ships, each with a crew of twenty-one men and a boy (a “gromet,” or “garcion,” as he was called) for fifteen days, at their own cost; and as long afterwards as might be required, on pay. The varied importance of the contributory ports seems to be reflected in the ships each then contracted to supply towards the tally. Thus Dover is set down for twenty-one; Winchelsea ten; Hastings six; and Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Rye five each.

Thus early were the merchants able to find a fleet for the King’s needs; and they obtained substantial return for the service. The Cinque Ports were given many valuable rights and privileges within and without their own boundaries. They were governed under a Lord Warden by a representative body of men freely chosen from each port, and were independent alike of the counties and of the King’s writ, and directly represented in Parliament and at the coronation of King and Queen. In place of the aldermen and councillors of municipal corporations, the freemen of the ports were styled “barons” and “jurats.” The right to govern one’s own affairs was not recognised in those times, and the concession granted to the freemen of the Cinque Ports was therefore of considerable value. They were, moreover, given a privilege that would be extremely valuable even now: that of trading free of toll everywhere throughout the kingdom. They were, in the words of Edward the First’s charter, “quit of all toll and custom, all lastage, tollage, passage, carriage, rivage, and pontage.” They had also the more abstruse rights of “Soc and sac, infangtheoff and utfangtheoff, wardship and marriage of heirs,” and were freed from the King’s right of prisage of imported wines.

The Cinque Ports navy, thus constituted, performed great services during several centuries. It not only conveyed the King’s troops in his wars with France, and Scotland, and in his subjugations of Ireland and Wales, but fought with, and generally vanquished, foreign fleets. It was only with the gradual growth of a royal navy, from the time of Henry the Seventh, that the importance of the Cinque Ports flotilla declined.

Its gradual declension was due rather to a rage for building big warships than to any decay in the ports. Much the same forces were at work then as those we see now. The Cinque Ports vessels were, in the first instance, merchantmen, and when they had performed their military service they resumed their trade. The great ships of war built by Henry the Eighth, the Mary Rose and the Harry Grace à Dieu, were the Dreadnoughts of their age, and led to competitive building on the part of foreign Powers. Among those leviathans the trading vessels of the ports seemed insignificant; although it was left for a much later age to prove that the fishing luggers of the Kentish coast could perform useful acts; as when they were armed during the scare of Napoleon’s projected invasion, and succeeded in capturing some French gunboats and putting privateers to flight.

With the decline of their especial usefulness, and with the growth everywhere of liberties, the peculiar privileges of the Cinque Ports either became anomalous or absolutely worthless, and so at length the office of Lord Warden grew more and more a mere ornamental distinction, generally conferred upon a statesman towards the close of his career. The honour is generally the coping-stone placed upon the achievements of public life. Together with the decline of this once great office, the various courts held for the conduct of Cinque Ports business have either ceased to exist or are brought into an effete and unwonted activity only on rare occasions, such as the Installation of a Lord Warden, or a coronation, when the “barons” claim their ancient rights of carrying a canopy over King and Queen. All these changes had come gradually about at the time when reform generally was in the air, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and most of these especial privileges were formally abolished by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835.

Sandwich was severely governed in mediæval times by its authorities, the “jurats or barons,” but not one whit more severely than other members of the Cinque Ports. The “common ordinances” proclaimed by authority of these jurats included a curious variety of enactments. No burgess was permitted to lend any money to spinners of wool on security of their wool, nor to tailors on their cloth; no dealer in fish was allowed to buy any fish in the market from a foreign fisherman, and no poulterer might purchase any poultry from a foreigner “until the better sort of people of the town had supplied themselves with what they wanted for their own use.” “Foreigner” in these cases meant merely a person who was not an inhabitant of Sandwich, not an alien.