Illustrated with Seven Plates, Descriptive of the Barbarous Cruelties. ALSO THE Trials of John Mills and Henry Sheerman; with an account of the wicked lives of the said Henry Sheerman, Lawrence and Thomas Kemp, Robert Fuller and Jockey Brown; and the Trials at large of Thomas Kingsmill and other Smugglers for Breaking open the Custom-house at Poole; with the Sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Chichester, at a Special Assize held there, by Bp. Ashburnham; also an Article on “Smuggling in

This History was first published in 1749, soon after the execution of Jackson, Carter, and other Smugglers, upon the Broyle, near Chichester. The writer in his Preface, says: “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are hereinafter inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among

The prisoners were brought out of the gaol about two in the afternoon of Thursday, the 19th of January, 1748–9, being the day after receiving sentence, when a company of Foot Guards and a party of Dragoons were drawn out ready to receive them, and to conduct them to the place of execution, which was about a mile out of the town. The procession was solemn and slow; and when they came to the tree, they all, except the two Mills’s, behaved a little more serious than they had done before. Carter sai

Job xxix., 14, 15, 16. “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and a diadem. “I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. “I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out.” That Job was a person of great eminence both for his birth and station, that he had the supreme rule and government, or was at least a principal magistrate of the place he dwelt in, appears plainly from this chapter, whence the text is taken. “When I came in pre

A few notes on the wool trade will best illustrate the origin of the illegal export of that article, of which Dryden in his “King Arthur,” says:— In the reign of Edward I., among the articles of inquiry before the jurors on the hundred rolls, 1274, was the illegal exportation of wool; [18] the Sussex return shows that it had been sent from Shoreham. [19] Soon after an export duty was imposed on English wool, of 20 s. a bag (or 3 l. of our money), increased to 40 s. (or 6 l. ) in 1296; then lower

The wars with France, in the time of King William and Queen Anne, revived and increased greatly the custom of import smuggling, for which the existing export system, already well organised, gave every convenience. It was in Romney Marsh that Hunt, in the year 1696, ran cargoes of Lyons silk and Valenciennes lace sufficient to load thirty pack-horses; and, under cover of these proceedings, kept a house of resort for men of high consideration among the Jacobites—of “earls and barons, knights and d

“The real story of his death is this. Daniel Scales was a desperate smuggler, and one night he, with many more, was coming from Brighton, heavily laden, when the excise officers and soldiers fell in with them. The smugglers fled in all directions; a riding-officer, as they were called, met this man, and called upon him to surrender his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, to use the words of the editor’s informant, a very respectable man and neighbour, who in early life was much engaged i