But Lydd was further subject to Romney as “member of the Town and Port,” and in token of this submission their custumal was kept at Romney. If they wanted to ascertain their rights they had to send a messenger to the superior town; and an entry in the accounts of Lydd tells how the corporation paid eightpence to “the servant of Romney bringing authority of having again our franchise.” Romney claimed to make awards on disputed questions, interfered about the Lydd markets, and ordered inquisitions as to whether they had been wrongfully held.793 Moreover as the inhabitants of Lydd “were contributors to Romney before all memory,” their officers had year after year to present themselves before the jurats of Romney in the Church of S. Nicholas carrying their accounts and such payments as were demanded by their rulers.794 Even after the men of Lydd had been given by Edward the First the same liberties and free customs as the other barons of the Cinque Ports, the sum of their taxes was fixed by Romney.
Among many masters the corporation was kept in a perpetual ferment. The boundaries of its territory were not finally decided till 1462, and the quarrel with Battle on this point kept lawyers and town clerks busy hurrying backwards and forwards between London and Lydd, or riding to Canterbury to get the Abbot’s charter, or to Winchelsea to meet the Abbot’s counsel.795 For a hundred years moreover the town kept up the long struggle to free itself from the supremacy of Romney. Already in 1384 deputations from both the towns met in Dover to discuss the terms of agreement between them with the Warden, and from that time lawyers were kept constantly at work, and a counsel seems to have been permanently employed in London, besides the deputations of bailiff, common clerk, and jurats sent there as well as to Dover, Sandwich, or Canterbury, and the messengers despatched with “courtesies” for the Lieutenant, the Seneschal, or the Clerk of Dover Castle, the Mayor and Clerk of Dover town, the Archbishop of Canterbury and his steward, the Common Clerk of Winchelsea and so on; while the salary of the Town Clerk, Thomas Caxton, probably a brother of the great printer, was raised again and again, so as to secure the services of the most skilful lawyer and able administrator in all the country round.796 Even in a trifling matter of taxation it was not till 1490 that the town was able to make a composition for a fixed yearly payment.797
IV. In the same way Sandwich had the mastery of the little town of Fordwich,798 which lay fifteen miles higher up the river and claimed dominion over a tiny territory reaching back from the water’s edge on either side as far as a man in a boat on the river could throw an axe of seven pounds called “Taperaxe.” The inhabitants elected every year a mayor, treasurer, and jurats to govern them and preserve the liberties of the town. The mayor with a black knotted stick as badge of his office, held his court of justice. He appointed every year four freemen to act as arbitrators in case of trespass, and if any townsman refused to accept their decision or tried to carry the cause to another court, he was fined the enormous sum of a hundred shillings, or thrown for a year into the town prison, a filthy hole of nine feet square which still exists. In capital cases the mayor could give sentence of death, and order the prosecutor if he won his suit to carry the condemned criminal to the “Thefeswell” and himself throw him into it with hands and feet tied, “knebent” as it was called.799
Fordwich however had been granted by the Confessor to S. Augustine’s, Canterbury.800 The Abbot owned the soil of the town; his bailiff lived within its walls and presided over the Hundred Court which he summoned by his officer “Cachepol”; he had his own prison; he was entitled to fines and forfeitures from felons and fugitives; and he claimed certain customs on all imports, and asserted a right to control the fisheries of the river so as to supply his monks at the fasting seasons.
The convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, owned on the other hand a quay at the highest point to which ships could pass up the river; to this quay wine, alum, Caen stone, etc., were brought for the use of the monastery, and endless quarrels were developed out of its trading monopolies.801
As a member of the Port of Sandwich the town was subject to certain regulations and taxations which Sandwich had a right to impose. When the chief Ports met to assess and distribute taxation among themselves, the voice of the lesser members of the confederation was never heard, and the dependent towns had simply to pay such proportions of the sum due as their masters ordered, and there were naturally frequent signs of grumbling and dissatisfaction.802 The severe protectionist laws which the Fordwich people passed against Sandwich as to the use of the common quay with the crane possibly indicates some attempt at encroachment which it was possible to resist as well as to resent.
Under the rude pressure of rival jurisdictions on every side, and from which there was no escape, the corporation needed constant vigilance in looking after its own interests. Like every other town big and little in the fifteenth century Fordwich made careful research into the true limits of its chartered rights, and the clerk wrote out new copies of their custumal and of the old record of their boundaries. In the only point where they had a chance of success its burghers fought with steady pugnacity for their privileges. Protesting that they held a monopoly of the quay where the ships were unloaded, they refused the customs demanded by S. Augustine’s, claimed the whole control of the river and of the three weirs which were made every year at the beginning of the fishing season, and at last forced a compromise which left the convent only the produce of a single weir.
If the lesser members of the Ports which were themselves corporate bodies, such as Lydd or Fordwich, could expect from their superiors no help in achieving independence, the non-corporate members were yet more completely withdrawn from the chance of assistance; for the seven great towns of the association would have looked with little tolerance on any revolt in their dependent villages.803 Undoubtedly the inhabitants of the Cinque Ports had their full share of the democratic temper that ruled in the trading towns of the eastern coast from the Wash to the Channel. Rebellion was in the air; and the labourers and miners of Kent and Sussex had an evil reputation in the Middle Ages as being most prone to civil dissensions, “as well for that they can hardly bear injuries as for that they are desirous of novelties.”804 There was never a rising in which they were not the most eager partizans of the revolutionary side. The men of Kent crowded after Cade. Hastings sent eleven soldiers to help him; Rye begged for his friendship; and Lydd sent its constable on horseback to meet him, wrote him a letter of excuse for not joining him, and presented him with a porpoise.805 When Warwick took up the cry of Cade they rallied to his side; and when he brought back Henry the Sixth in 1470 they again gave him support.806 In the internal politics of the towns we meet the same temper; and however obscure and insignificant were the struggles of the Ports and of the humble villages that gathered around them, they reveal to us the militant spirit of self-assertion which was stirring in every hamlet in England. But with this sturdy spirit of municipal freedom the question of federal organization had nothing whatever to do. We have seen that the trading privileges won in early days by the joint action of the towns were confined to the supervision of the herring fair at Yarmouth, and that the association never developed into a great commercial league after the imposing pattern of the towns of Picardy or of the Rhine. Still less did the union resemble any of the federative republics formed across the water in Ponthieu or the Laonnais for mutual aid against the enemies of their peace or liberties.807 There is no evidence that the confederation of the Cinque Ports afforded to its members any security of municipal freedom, or any extension of the rights to be won from their several lords; and as a matter of fact this group of favoured towns does not seem to have made the slightest advance on other English boroughs, either in winning an earlier freedom, or in raising a higher standard of liberty. In fact the history of the sixteenth century was to prove that there was no more formidable opposition to the growing democracies in the Kent and Sussex towns than the respectable official company that gathered at Romney and ate together the annual feast of the Court of Brotherhood.