But to-day the stranger in the village may chance, if he inquires a little into the history of the place, to hear wild and whirling accounts of this famous event; and, if he be at all enterprising, will find in the parish registers of burials this one piece of documentary evidence toward the execution done that day:
“1747, Ap. 20, George Kingsmill, Dux sclerum glande plumbeo emisso, cecidit.”
All these things, moreover, are duly enshrined, amid much fiction, in the pages of G. P. R. James’s novel, “The Smuggler.”
And still the story of outrage continued. On August 14th, 1747, a band of twenty swaggering smugglers rode, well-armed and reckless, into Rye and halted at the “Red Lion” inn, where they remained drinking until they grew rowdy and violent.
Coming into the street again, they discharged their pistols at random, and, as the old account of these things concludes, “observing James Marshall, a young man, too curious of their behaviour, carried him off, and he has not since been heard of.”
History tells us nothing of the fate of that unfortunate young man; but, from other accounts of the bloodthirsty characters of these Kentish and Sussex malefactors, we imagine the very worst.
Others, contemporary with them—if, indeed, they were not the same men, as seems abundantly possible—captured two revenue officers near Seaford, and, securely pinning them down to the beach at low-water mark, so that they could not move, left them there, so that, when the tide rose, they were drowned.
Again, on September 14th of this same year, 1747, a smuggler named Austin, violently resisting arrest, shot a sergeant dead with a blunderbuss at Maidstone.
In “The Smugglers’ Song” Mr. Rudyard Kipling has vividly reconstructed those old times of dread, when, night and day, the numerous and well-armed bodies of smugglers openly traversed the country, terrorising every one. To look too curiously at these high-handed ruffians 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—by turning their faces the other way when the free-traders passed. Mothers, too, were careful to bid their little ones on the Marshland roads, or in the very streets of New Romney, to turn their faces to the hedge-side, or to the wall, “when the gentlemen went by.” And—
If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street;
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the parson;
’Baccy for the clerk;
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,And watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.