At Guilford Ferry the pursuers were so close upon their heels that they had to hurriedly dismount and tumble into some boats belonging to ships lying near, leaving their horses behind; and so they came safe, but breathless, into Rye town.
At this period Calais—then lost to England—alone imported within two years 40,000 packs of wool from Kent and Sussex; and the Romney Marsh men not only sold their own wool in their illicit manner, but bought other from up-country, ten or twenty miles inland, and impudently shipped it off.
In 1698, the severe laws of some thirty years earlier having been thus brought into contempt, milder penal enactments were introduced, but more stringent conditions than ever were imposed upon the collection and export of this greatly vexed commodity, and the civil deterrents of process and fine, 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, that none of the wool he should buy should be sold by him to any persons within fifteen miles of the sea; and growers of wool in those counties, within ten miles of the coast, were obliged, within three days of shearing, to account for the number of fleeces shorn, and to state where they were stored.
The success of this new law was not at first very marked, for the means of enforcing it had not been provided. To enact repressive edicts, and not to provide the 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 surveyors for nineteen counties, with 299 riding-officers: a force barely sufficient for Kent and Sussex alone. It cost £20,000 a year, and never earned its keep.
Henry Baker, supervisor for Kent and Sussex, writing on April 25th, 1699, to his official chiefs, stated that there would be shorn in Romney Marsh, quite apart 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, “the greatest part whereof will immediately be sent off hot into France—it being so designed, preparations in great measure being already made for that purpose.”
In fact, the new law at first did nothing more than to give the owlers some extra trouble and expense in cartage of their packs; for, in order to legally evade the extra disabilities it imposed, it was only necessary to cart them fifteen miles inland and make fictitious sale and re-sale of them there; thence shipping them as they pleased.
By this time the exportation of wool had become not only a kingly concern—it had aroused the keen interest of the nation at large, fast becoming an industrial and cloth-weaving nation. For two centuries and more past the cloth-workers had been growing numerous, 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 his business. It is obvious that if export of it could have been wholly stopped, the cloth-workers, in the forced absence of foreign buyers, would have held the unfortunate growers in the hollow of their hands, and would have been able to dictate the price of wool.
It is the inalienable right of every human being to fight against unjust laws; only we must be sure they are unjust. Perhaps the dividing-line, when self-interest is involved, is not easily to be fixed. But there can be no doubt that the wool-growers were labouring under injustice, and that they were entirely justified in setting those laws at naught which menaced their existence.
However, by December 1703, Mr. Baker was able to give his superiors a more favourable report. He believed the neck of the owling trade to have been broken and the 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 quantities of wool being exported: which seems to us rather to point to the perfected organisation of the owling trade than to its being crushed out of existence.