Rye had been founded in the 11th century on a manorial estate belonging to the Norman abbey of Fécamp. Its name, meaning ‘the island’, reflects its situation at the confluence of rivers and the sea which formed the natural harbour known as the Camber. The proximity of Rye to Winchelsea, coupled with the fact that until 1247 they were both under the lordship of the same abbey, caused them to be long treated for administrative purposes as a unit, and their interests remained closely linked.
New Romney had been founded in the tenth century to take the place of the port of Old Romney, which had silted up. The retreat of the sea from New Romney in its turn, hastened in the late 13th century by the effects of great storms which blocked the mouth of the river Rother, so causing it to break through to the sea at Rye instead of at Romney, meant that by 1400 the silting up of the harbour had become irreversible, despite the efforts of the local people to dredge channels.
In Anglo-Saxon times the port had been situated at West Hythe, but the retreat of the coastline prompted the development of Hythe itself some time before the Conquest. Hythe was unable as a consequence of poverty to produce a warship for the King’s service in 1341, but thereafter it apparently maintained a modest prosperity as a market town and fishing port until, in May 1401, it suffered a severe fire in which, it was reported, more than 200 houses were burnt down and goods to the value of £600 destroyed.
Hastings, initially one of the foremost of the Cinque Ports, was by this period the furthest decayed of them, owing to the early silting of its harbour. So far as ship-service to the Crown was concerned, it had long since passed on the bulk of its contribution of 21 vessels to its former members, or limbs, Rye and Winchelsea; and, under an agreement made in 1392, it was now required to find only five ships, and even two of these were in fact to be supplied by other members.
No fortification in the British Isles has a longer recorded history than Dover castle, and the town on its doorstep shares its antiquity. Dover’s prosperity was firmly based on its position as the main port of embarkation for travellers to the continent. It suffered for a time in Edward III’s early French wars, owing to the absence of a secure port of landing on the other side of the Channel, but the capture of Calais remedied this lack, though it also provided a rival for control of the crossing.
Seaford had been in use as a port from at least the 11th century. It supplied vessels for Edward II’s wars; and in our period the wool merchants of Lewes and the South Downs regularly made shipments there.
Commanding the shortest sea passage to France, Dover, described by one observer in 1635 as a ‘long town … indifferently well built’, was the only Cinque Port to retain much economic importance, boasting as it did a substantial fleet of trading vessels. ‘A Relation of a Short Survey of the Western Counties’ ed. G. Wickham Legg, in Cam. Miscellany XVI (Cam. Soc. ser. 3. lii), 26. For the size of Dover’s fleet, see SP14/140/68; Eg. 2584, ff. 375-80v. Its prosperity, however, was achieved only at the price of constant maintenance work on pier and harbour.
Sandwich was a chartered borough before Domesday. The easternmost of the Cinque Ports, its limbs included Deal, Fordwich, Ramsgate and even Brightlingsea in Essex. Its harbour decayed in Tudor times because of the growth of a sandbank across the entrance, preventing the entry of all but the smallest ships. Boys, 684. During the early seventeenth century the borough frequently lobbied for a new haven to be built, but the estimated cost – more than £50,000 – was prohibitive. E. Kent Archives Cent. Sa/AC7, f.
One of the original five members of the Cinque Ports, the ancient coastal town of Hastings can trace its history back to the early tenth century. By the early modern period the town consisted of two parallel streets that met at the upper end. A stream, known as the Bourne, divided the two roads, which were connected by several small lanes.VCH Suss. ix. 5, 8. During the early medieval period Hastings enjoyed great prosperity owing to its natural harbour, and from 1369 it claimed to be chief among the Cinque Ports.K.M.E. Murray, Constitutional Hist.
