trade.  We need not weary the reader with the details of the means which were periodically taken to stop this trade by the English kings.  It is enough to state that practically all the ports of Sussex and Kent were busily engaged in the illegal business.  Neither the penalties of death, nor the fixing of the price of wool, nor the regulating of the rate of duty availed in the long-run.  Licences to export this article were continually evaded, creeks and quiet bays were the scenes where the fleece was shipped for France and the Low Countries.  Sometimes the price of wool fell, sometimes it rose; sometimes the Crown received a greater amount of duty, at other times the royal purse suffered very severely.  In the time of Elizabeth the encouragement of foreign weavers to make their homes in England was likely to do much to keep the wool in the country, especially as there began to be increased wealth in our land, and families began to spend more money on personal comforts.

Even in the time of Charles I. proclamations were issued against exporting wool, yet the mischief still went on.  In the time of Charles ii. men readily “risked their necks for 12d. a day."[1] The greatest part of the wool was sent from Romney Marsh, where, after nightfall, it was put on board French shallops with ten or twenty men to guard it, all well armed.  And other parts of Sussex as well as Kent and even Essex were also engaged in similar exportations.

But it is from the time of King Charles ii. that the first serious steps were taken to cope with the smuggling evil, and from here we really take our starting-point in our present inquiry.  Prior to his time the Customs, as a subsidy of the king, were prone to much variability.  In the time of James I., for instance, they had been granted to the sovereign for life, and he claimed to alter the rates as he chose when pressed for money.  When Charles I. came to the throne the Commons, instead of voting them for the extent of the sovereign’s life, granted them for one year only.  At a later date in the reign of that unhappy king the grant was made only for a couple of months.  These dues were known as tonnage and poundage, the former being a duty of 1s. 6d. to 3s. levied on every ton of wine and liquor exported and imported.  Poundage was a similar tax of 6d. to 1s. on every pound of dry goods.

It was not till after the Restoration that the customs were settled and more firmly established, a subsidy being “granted to the king of tonnage and poundage and other sums of money payable upon merchandise exported and imported.”  Nominally the customs were employed for defraying the cost of “guarding and defending the seas against all persons intending the disturbance of his subjects in the intercourse of trade, and the invading of this realm.”  And so, also, there was inaugurated a more systematic and efficient method of preventing this export smuggling.  So far as one can find any records from the existing