was afterwards pardoned. This affair caused great excitement at Hastings. There is a tombstone in All Saints' churchyard recording the occurrence."
"In February, 1827, about twenty smugglers went down to the eastward of Fairlight. They wrested some muskets from the Blockademen,' beat them with the butt ends, and run one of them through with a bayonet. The smugglers retreated, leaving one dead ; another was found afterwards, having been apparently dropped by the smugglers ; a third, some distance on the way to Icklesham, the body scarcely cold ; the rest were carried off.
"During the time of the Coast blockade, affrays between the smugglers and the Blockademen were frequent and bloody. Nearly the last of those blood-sheddings took place," says Mr. William Durrant Cooper, "on January 3rd, 1828, near Bexhill ; I have had an opportunity of gathering some of the particulars of this event from one of the participators, now living at Bexhill. According to his account a cargo of goods was landed at Mr. Brook's forty-acre point near Bexhill. It was a moonlight night, the moon being in the last quarter. The tubs of spirits were loaded on men's shoulders and in carts. A noted smuggler, a native of Bexhill, was captain of the boat. Of this man (now living, I believe), I shall have something further to narrate. The Coast Blockademen from Galley Hill Tower tried to intercept the smugglers, but finding themselves too weak for the purpose (the smugglers being armed, and having likewise with them sixteen or eighteen batsmen), they obtained reinforcements that raised their number to about forty men. They came up with the smugglers near Sidley, and here the armed portion of the smugglers drew themselves up in regular line, and a desperate fight took place. In the first onset a quarter- master, named Collins, was killed. Two batsmen were also killed ; the body of one named Smithurst was carried and laid in the barn of ' Cramp's Farm.' When his body was found his bat was still grasped in his hands, and it was almost hacked in pieces by the cutlasses of the Blockademen. The goods were all got away, as were also all the wounded. One of the wounded men, named P_______, was taken to his home, a lonely house near Windmill Hill, and the surgeon who attended him was in the habit of taking his horse to a gentleman's stables in the neighbourhood, putting him up there, and quietly walking across the fields to the house where his patient was lying. The smuggler became a cripple for life."
"The habit of export smuggling has been, for some hundreds of years at least, part of the system to which the middle and lower classes in Sussex have been trained. Large fortunes were made by it in East Sussex. It principally consisted of wool, from the sheep of Romney Marsh, and it came to an end only during the last war with France. The practice of import smuggling greatly increased -
