Cinque Ports

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cinque Ports were once the most powerful confederation of coastal towns in England. At their peak in the Late Middle Ages, over 40 settlements along the shores of Kent, Sussex, and Essex owed allegiance to a common arrangement that traded warships for extraordinary freedoms. Their name, Old French for "five harbours", is something of a fiction: the confederation grew well beyond its original five members, absorbing ancient towns and limbs across the south-eastern coastline. What drove a clutch of fishing villages to become quasi-baronial powers, with their own courts, their own laws, and their own seats in Parliament? And what brought so formidable an alliance to its knees? The answers involve shifting sand, the silting of rivers, plague, French raids, and a flood in February 1287 that changed the course of the River Rother. The story of the Cinque Ports is also the story of how England's relationship with the sea was built, bargained for, and ultimately outgrown.

• 2. A Deal Struck in Ships

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  Edward the Confessor, who ruled from 1042 to 1066, is believed to have laid the groundwork for the confederation. Certain south-eastern ports were granted the local profits of justice in return for providing ships to the Crown. The arrangement was not formalised immediately: the ship service of Romney, Dover, and Sandwich appears in Domesday Book in 1086, but the term "Cinque Ports" itself only came into use by 1135. By 1155, a royal charter had established the ports' obligation to maintain ships in readiness for the Crown. The earliest general charter granting liberties to all the ports in common dates from 1260, and their freedoms are even mentioned in the Magna Carta of 1297. The core obligation, the price of all those privileges, was to provide 57 ships for 15 days' service to the king each year, with each port shouldering a portion of that burden. The historian N. A. M. Rodger has questioned whether this arrangement was ever intended to raise genuinely effective naval power. He argues instead that the original privileges may have been granted by Edward the Confessor partly to purchase the loyalty of strategically important ports that controlled cross-Channel traffic. Whatever the Crown's true intention, in the 13th and 14th centuries the ports did play a significant role in the defence of the realm.

• 3. Freedoms Unlike Any Other

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  Exemption from tax and tallage was only the beginning. The towns of the confederation gained rights that gave them sweeping authority over their own affairs, authority that most English towns could not imagine. They held rights of sac and soc, meaning jurisdiction over criminal and civil cases within their boundaries. They could punish those who shed blood, seize and execute thieves, and enter private property to build sea defences. They could claim flotsam, jetsam, and the cargo of wrecked ships. In effect, the confederation operated like a shire unto itself. From the 13th century, representatives of the ports sat in Parliament. By the end of the 14th century, the practice was regularised: the five head ports, the two ancient towns, and one corporate limb, Seaford, were each entitled to send two members to Parliament. All freemen of the ports, known as Portsmen, were regarded in the feudal age as barons. A 14th-century treatise called Modus Tenendi Parliamentum ranked the Barons of the Cinque Ports below the lay magnates but above the representatives of ordinary shires and boroughs. A privilege granted in 1322, in recognition of the ports' support of the Despensers, father and son, made that baronial standing explicit. Since time immemorial, the barons had held the right to carry a canopy above the monarch during the procession between Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey.

• 4. Courts, Herring, and the Brotherhood

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  Many of the Portsmen were fishermen who sailed annually to the Norfolk coast to pursue herring. They claimed rights of "den and strand" on the sandbank at the mouth of the River Yare, and the settlement there gradually developed into Yarmouth. Regulating the annual autumn Herring Fair at Yarmouth was probably the main incentive for the individual ports to work together as a collective at all. The confederation developed three distinct assemblies to govern itself. The court of Shepway, first mentioned in the late 12th century, was a local royal court of justice presided over by an officer of the Crown; it met at Shepway Cross, near Lympne. The Brodhull was a general assembly for the five head ports and two ancient towns, and from after 1357 met regularly in New Romney. By 1432 it met twice a year; meetings followed a parliamentary pattern and were presided over by a Speaker, whose appointment rotated from port to port in geographical order from west to east, changing on the 21st of May each year. A third body, the Guestling, appears to have begun as a local meeting of the western ports around Hastings, Winchelsea, and Rye. Over the 16th century it grew into a more general meeting covering all the head ports, ancient towns, and corporate limbs, and eventually outranked the Brotherhood in importance. The White Book, covering the years 1432 to 1571, and the Black Book, covering 1572 to 1955, together hold the minutes of both courts; both volumes were transferred to the Kent Archives Office in Maidstone in 1960.

• 5. Sand, Sea, and the End of an Era

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  Nature was, in the long run, a more destructive force than any French raider. A series of severe storms in the latter part of the 13th century weakened the coastal defences of Romney Marsh, and the South England flood of February 1287 was catastrophic. At New Romney, once a major port at the mouth of the River Rother, the harbour and town were filled with sand, silt, mud, and debris. The River Rother changed course entirely, now running out into the sea near Rye in Sussex. New Romney ceased to be a port. Much of Hastings was washed away by the sea in the 13th century; in a naval campaign of 1339, and again in 1377, the French raided and burnt the town. Attempts to build a stone harbour during the reign of Elizabeth I ended when the foundations were destroyed by storms. Sandwich, once one of the five original ports, now lies 3 kilometres from the sea. Hythe remains on the coast, but centuries of silting removed its natural harbour. Only Dover is still a major port. The rise of Southampton and the need for larger ships than the 21-man service of the ports could crew further hastened the confederation's decline. Queen Elizabeth I, recognising the ports were crumbling, sanctioned the first national lottery in 1569 in an effort to raise funds for their repair. Yet in 1689, the Cinque Ports were still specifically called to elect representatives to the Convention Parliament that enacted the English Bill of Rights.

• 6. Arms, Canopy, and Ceremony

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  The coat of arms of the confederation depicts, on one side, three gold half-lions on a red field, and on the other, three gold half-ships on a blue field. The earliest certain evidence for the arms is on a common seal of Dover dating from 1305, though they also appear on the seal of Hastings, which may be a few years earlier, and they are thought to have been first introduced around 1297. The arms were long assumed to be the product of heraldic dimidiation, a technique of combining half of one coat of arms with half of another. The prevailing view, however, is that they were designed from the outset as three half-lion, half-ship creatures, probably on a red field, with the field only partitioned into two colours later, probably in the mid-14th century. In 2017, the Cinque Ports Authority registered with the UK Flag Registry a flag of three gold ships' hulls on a blue field as a community flag that any person may fly. The coronation canopy tradition, which ended after the Coronation of George IV in 1821, was given a new form for the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902: the barons were assigned roles inside Westminster Abbey, receiving the banners of the monarch's realms. For the Coronation of Charles III and Camilla in 2023, fourteen barons joined the congregation in the abbey, representing the five original ports, the two ancient towns, and the seven limbs.