HISTORY of SUSSEX
A Story of Contraband in Sussex: Page 1
" Sussex men that dwell upon the shore
Look out when storms arise, and billows roar,
Devoutly praying with uplifted hands
That some well-laden ship may strike the sands,
To whose rich cargo they may make pretence,
And fatten on the spoil of Providence."
In respect of lawless adventures on the sea, Sussex men can claim the
credit - or the discredit - of a record going back further almost than any
other part of the country.
It begins, perhaps, with the wild and tangled love story which the Saxon
Chronicle relates of Sweyn, eldest son of the great earl Godwin, whose possessions
lay largely in Kent and Sussex. Sweyn fell so deeply in love with the beautiful
abbess of "Leominster," which some have identified with Lyminster
in West Sussex, that he induced her to fly with him from her convent.
Being banished for this deed by Edward the Confessor, he betook himself
to Denmark, where he fitted out ships to ravage the English coasts. He
sought an audience of the King, and when his brother Harold and his cousin
Beorn refused to help him, he enticed Beorn on to his ship at Bosham, and
carried him off to " Tarantamutha," where he " ordered him
to be slain and buried deep," which was done. "
" Tarantamutha " has been generally translated Dartmouth, but
there is some evidence that the Arun was formerly called " Tarrant,''
and the Rev. K. H. MacDermott thinks the whole story points to the Arun
as a much more likely place of flight for Sweyn than the Dart.
For this foul deed the King proclaimed Sweyn an outlaw. A little before
this, the men of Hastings and there abouts had fought two of Sweyn's ships,
and slain all the men, and brought the ships to Sandwich to the King.
" Eight ships had he before he betrayed Beorn, and afterwards they all
forsook him except two, whereupon he went eastwards to the land of Baldwin
(Count of Flanders), and sat there all the winter at Bruges in full security."
King Edward was at length prevailed upon to pardon this turbulent youth
and restore him his forfeited honours. So Sweyn came off better than he
deserved.
Having regard to the temper of our old-time seagoing ancestors, it is
not to be wondered at that the first recorded system of " tariffs "
quickly opened up a new field for their restless activities. There have
been times when the proportions of Sussex smuggling were such as to entitle
it to be called a county industry, and there is scarcely a place on our
seacoast which has not its tale of smuggler doings.
Sussex smuggling began on an extensive scale long before the days of high
import duties. The earliest smugglers, however, did not bring contraband
goods into the country: they took them abroad out of England. They concerned
themselves not with wines and silks, laces and tobacco, but with our own
home-grown produce, the soft warm wool of the Sussex sheep.
King Edward I, who as Prince had read the citizens of Rye and Winchelsea
such a severe lecture on the wickedness of piracy, set their lawless sailors
roving on fresh adventures by putting a heavy export duty on wool. This
at once opened up a promising business in contraband, for the merchants
of the Continent were keen for English wool, and great quantities were grown
in the Kent and Sussex marshes.
Of the adventures of those early smugglers we have no record, but the
smuggling of wool out of England seems to have gone on very profitably for
the smugglers, and Edward III, following on the same lines as his grandfather,
tried to stop it by making it a capital offence. At the same time he forbade
the wear of any clothes made beyond seas, and appointed ten towns in England
as "staples" for the weighing of the wool which the country produced.
Chichester, which was one of the principal Sussex markets for the sale
of wool, and to which buyers came each July from all parts of England, was
one of these ten towns. (There was a Chichester firm of wool-staplers, Messrs.
Prior, whose name appeared in the same business in those far-off days.)
These new regulations, far from stopping the traffic, seem to have given
the smugglers a new inducement, for not only was the wool taken out, but
the merchants of Middelburg and Calais set up a secret traffic to bring
their cloth into England in exchange for the smuggled wool.
Wool smuggling went merrily on till quite modern times. In 1698 the Government
aimed a direct blow at the forbidden industry in Kent and Sussex by enacting
that no person living within 13 miles of the sea in those counties should
buy any wool before he had entered into a bond with sureties not to sell
it again to any person living within 13 miles of the sea.
Notwithstanding this law, the coast men openly carried their wool on horses'
backs to the shore, where French vessels were ready to receive it.
Anyone who was foolhardy enough to interrupt their proceedings did so
at his peril. These daring wool smugglers were given the name of "owlers."
The extent to which the traffic went on is shown by a report of one Henry
Baker, supervisor of customs in Kent and Sussex in 1699, who says that in
a few weeks there would be shorn in Romney Marshes 160,000 sheep, whose
fleeces would amount to about 3,000 packs of wool, " the greatest part
whereof will be immediately sent off hot into France."
At the end of the 17th century an Act of Parliament was passed ordering
all bodies to be buried in woollen, the purpose being " to lessen the
importation of linen from beyond the seas, and the encouragement of the
woollen manufactures of this Kingdom.'
An affidavit had to be made at the time of burial that the Act had been
complied with, and most of our burial registers have reference to these
affidavits at the entries about 1690.
In 1731 the wool manufacturers, whose lawful profits of course were greatly
affected by the smuggling trade, petitioned the Government for greater vigilance
against the " owlers," and stated that the growing decay of the
woollen manufacture was due to this cause, and it was " feared that
some gentlemen of no mean rank whose estates bordered on the sea coast,
were too much influenced by a near but false prospect of gain to apply a
remedy." This enactment against the "owlers" of Kent and
Sussex was in force until the nineteenth century.
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Smuggling in Sussex
