Commons 1422-1461

The surviving records provide a patchy and sometimes contradictory view of the state of Winchelsea’s economy in the period which followed soon after Henry V had decreed that the Port should be reduced in size. Winchelsea had ceased to be a head port for the collection of customs over 40 years earlier, and the two customers appointed for Chichester, in the west of Sussex, were held jointly responsible by the Exchequer for the entire coastline of the county. In practice, however, the two men divided the area between them, with one of the customers having Winchelsea as his base in the east.

The largest of the Cinque Ports in Kent, Sandwich had a population of some 3,000 in the late fourteenth century. It was also the most prosperous of the confederation’s Ports in the county – notwithstanding exaggerated claims made in the 1380s and again in the first decade of the fifteenth century that the effects of the Hundred Years’ War and the ravages of plague had left Sandwich desolate and ‘so empty and weak that the inhabitants are not able to defend it’.

The effects of the attack on Rye by the French in 1377 were still being felt in Henry VI’s reign. Attempts had been made to erect fortifications to prevent such an assault succeeding again, and new building had taken place, albeit outside the walls in preference to restoring the burnt and ruined houses within. Those assessed for a scot in Rye in 1414-15 numbered 138 persons altogether, with the mayor, John Shelley, Robert Onewyn alias Taylor† and one other Portsman taxed at the highest amount of one mark each.

The tenth-century foundation of New Romney was a response to the silting up of the original port of Old Romney, two miles to the east. From at least the 1200s, however, the sea was in retreat from New Romney as well. A storm of 1287 flooded the town and port with mud and shingle and permanently diverted the course of the river Rother, rerouting it to meet the sea at Rye, and by Henry VI’s reign New Romney had lost much of its former economic significance. Romney also lacked a strategic role in the period under review.