The Smugglers
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE SMUGGLERS CHARLES G. HARPER CHAPTER I. THE “OWLERS” OF ROMNEY MARSH, AND THE ANCIENT EXPORT SMUGGLING OF WOOL. The earliest conflicts of interests between smugglers and the Government were concerned with the export of goods, and not with imports. We are accustomed to think only of the import smuggler, who brought from across Channel, or from more distant shores, the spirits, wines, tea, coffee, silks, laces, and tobacco that had never yielded to the revenue of the country; but before him in point of time, if not also in importance, was the ―owler‖ who, defying all prohibitions and penalties, even to those of bodily mutilation and death, sold wool out of England and secretly shipped it at night from the shores of Kent and Sussex. English wool had from a very early date been greatly in demand on the Continent. The England of those distant times was a purely agricultural country, innocent of arts, industries, and manufactures, except of the most primitive description. The manufacturers then exercised their skilled trades largely in France and the Low Countries; and, in especial, the cloth-weaving industries were practised in Flanders. So early as the reign of Edward the First the illegal exportation of wool engaged the attention of the authorities, and an export duty of £3 a bag (in modern money) was imposed, soon after 1276. This was in 1298 increased to £6 a bag, then lowered, and then again raised. English wool was then worth 1s. 6d. a pound. In the reign of Edward the Third a strenuous attempt was made to introduce the weaving industries into England, and every inducement was offered the Flemish weavers to settle here and to bring their art with them. In support of this policy, the export of wool was, in various years, subjected to further restrictions, and at one time entirely forbidden. The royal solicitude for the newly cradled English weaving industries also in 1337 forbade the wearing of clothing made with cloth woven out of the country; but it is hardly necessary to add that edicts of this stringency were constantly broken; and in 1341 Winchelsea, Chichester, and thirteen other ports were named, whence wool might be exported, on payment of a duty of 50s. a sack of twenty-six stone—i.e. 364 lb. The interferences with the sale and export of wool continued, and the duty was constantly being raised or lowered, according to the supposed needs of the time; but nearly always with unforeseen and disastrous effects. The wool staple was removed to the then English possession of Calais in 1363, and the export of it absolutely forbidden elsewhere. The natural result, in spite of the great amount of smuggling carried on, was that in a long series of years the value of wool steadily fell; the cloth-makers taking advantage of the accumulation of stocks on the growers‘ hands to depress the price. In 1390 the growers had from three to five seasons‘ crops on hand, and the state of the industry had become such that in the following year permission to export generally, on payment of duty, was conceded. This duty tended to become gradually heavier, and, as it increased, so proportionably did the ―owling‖ trade. The price of wool therefore declined again, and in 1454 it was recorded as being not more than two-thirds of what it had been a hundred and ten years earlier. The wool-growers, on the brink of ruin, petitioned that wool, according to its various grades, might not be sold under certain fixed prices; which were accordingly fixed. But to follow, seriatim, the movements in prices and the complete reversals of Government policy regarding the export, would be wearisome. We will, therefore, pass on to the Restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, when the export of wool was again entirely forbidden. Smuggling of it was in 1662 again, by the reactionary laws of the period, made a felony, punishable with death; yet the active smugglers, the rank and file of the owling trade, who performed the hard manual labour for wages, at the instigation of those financially interested, continued to risk their necks for twelvepence a day. The low price their services commanded is alone sufficient to show us that labour, in spite of the risks, was plentiful. Not only Kent and Sussex, but Essex, and Ireland as well, largely entered into this secret ―stealing of wool out of the country,‖ as the phrase ran; and ―these caterpillars‖ had so many evasions, and commanded so many combinations and interests among those officials whose business it was to detect and punish, that few dared interfere: hence the readiness of the labourers to ―risk their necks,‖ the risk being, under the circumstances, small. Indeed, readers of the adventures of these owling desperadoes and of the customs officers who hunted them will, perhaps, come to the conclusion that the risks on either side were pretty evenly apportioned, and they will see that the hunters not seldom became the hunted. The experiences of one W. Carter, who appears to have been in authority over the customs staff in the Romney Marsh district, towards the close of the seventeenth century, were at times singularly vivid. His particular ―hour of crowded life‖ came in 1688, while he was engaged in an attempt to arrest a body of owlers who were shipping wool into some French shallops between Folkestone and New Romney. Having procured the necessary warrants, he repaired to Romney, where he seized eight or ten men who were carrying the wool on their horses‘ backs to be shipped, and desired the Mayor of Romney to commit them, but, greatly to the surprise of this zealous officer, who doubtless imagined he had at last laid some of these desperate fellows securely by the heels, the Mayor of Romney consented to the prisoners being admitted to bail. Mr. Carter, to have been so ingenuously surprised, must have been a singularly simple official, or quite new to the business; for what Mayor of Romney in those days, when every one on the Marsh smuggled, or was interested financially in the success of smuggling, would dare not deal leniently with these fellows! Nay, it was even abundantly probable that the Mayor himself was financially committed in these ventures, and perhaps even among the employers of Mr. Carter‘s captives. Romney was no safe abiding-place for Carter and his underlings when these men were enlarged; and they accordingly retired upon Lydd. But if they had fondly expected peace and shelter there they were woefully mistaken, for a Marshland cry of vengeance was raised, and a howling mob of owlers, ululating more savagely than those melancholy birds from whom they took their name, violently attacked them in that little town, under cover of night. The son of the Mayor of Lydd, well disposed to these sadly persecuted revenue men, advised them to further retire upon Rye, which they did the next morning, December 13th, pursued hotly across the dyke- intersected marshes, as far as Camber Point, by fifty furious men. 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 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.