The easternmost of the cinque ports, Sandwich, which incorporated Deal, Fordwich, Ramsgate and Brightlingsea, was located inland of the south Kent coast, on the banks of the River Stour and on the southern side of the Wantsum Channel which traditionally divided mainland Kent from the Isle of Thanet. D. Gardiner, Historic Haven (1954), 3. Like many ports in the region, its fortunes were threatened by encroaching sandbanks, but it fared worse than most.
Situated on the River Rother, New Romney was an ancient trading town, albeit one which, like so many southern ports, had long since decayed, and had little or no access to the sea. Although its population had probably declined – there were 230 individuals of communicable age in 1676 – it had residual importance in the mid-seventeenth century because of its role as the venue for the Guestling, the assembly of the Cinque Ports.
As was the case with many ports on England’s south coast in the early modern period, Hythe’s importance had been undermined by the forces of nature: by the late sixteenth century the shingle deposits by which it was affected reduced it to little more than a local fishing harbour. K.M.E. Murray, Const. Hist. of the Cinque Ports (1935), 208-9. As its mercantile base withered, so too did its population, and the Compton Census recorded only 300 inhabitants of communicable age.
The largest of the ancient ports in the south east of England, and the one with the most direct route to the continent, by the early seventeenth century Dover was the only Cinque Port which retained mercantile prominence, and the wealth which went with it. In 1634 it was required to pay £260 towards the county’s Ship Money assessment, a sum exceeded only by Canterbury and Maidstone. E. Kent RO, Do/AAm2, f.
In the sixteenth century Rye, situated at the end of a tidal bay formed by the estuaries of the rivers Brede, Tillingham and Rother, and on a promontory on the edge of Romney Marsh, was the wealthiest Sussex town. By the 1570s it was the most important port on the south coast, and among the ten most important in the country, approximately as busy as Bristol. Its trade, dominated by the fishing industry, was undertaken with many European trading centres, especially those along the Channel.
Winchelsea, one of the ancient towns added to the Cinque Ports, had been prominent in the middle ages as a Templar centre and its port was initially more important than its near neighbour, Rye. It obtained a charter in 1191. On the east side of an estuary at the mouth of the rivers Rother, Brede and Tillingham, it was destroyed by the sea in thirteenth century, but then rebuilt on a new site in the nearby parish of Icklesham. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was a ‘decayed’ port, with diminished trade and population.
Hastings, in the Bourne valley on the east Sussex coast, was one of the original Cinque Ports, and a centre for fishing and for the transport of commodities related to the iron industry, as well as a focal point of the county’s sea defences. The town’s status as a port had been declining since the middle ages, however, as Rye and Winchelsea increased in importance, and much of the commerce with which Hastings was involved appears to have been coastal. The harbour had decayed significantly by the mid-sixteenth century, attempts to raise money for repairs having proved fruitless.
Seaford was an ancient harbour on the south coast of Sussex, on the edge of the South Downs. By the thirteenth century the town’s location at the then mouth of the river Ouse gave it some local importance as both a port and a fort, although it was never a major mercantile centre. Recs. of the Corporation of Seaford ed. F.W. Steer (1959), 52; M.A. Lower, Memorials of Seaford (1855), pp. v, 1. It was the most eminent of the ‘limb’ ports – attached to the Cinque Port of Hastings – and the only one which sent Members to Parliament.
The Cinque Ports, which had their own charter and institutional structures, nevertheless had an anomalous status in the seventeenth century, as they were governed by a lord warden, based at Dover, who exercised powers akin to, but distinct from, the lord high admiral. They also enjoyed certain liberties, in terms of exemption from taxes and impositions, which they were determined to defend, not least by retaining the services of a string of powerful lawyers, including Serjeants Nathaniel Finch*, Ralph Whitfield, and Thomas Twisden*. Cal. White and Black Bks.