Since the formation of the English Channel after the last ice age, Kent has stood as the closest part of our island to mainland Europe. The distance across the Dover Strait is just twenty-one miles. The land of Kent (ancient Cantium, perhaps ‘corner land’ or ‘land on the edge’), itself, is geographically well defined, comprising a peninsula bounded by the Thames Estuary and North Sea along its northern margin and the Dover Strait and the English Channel on the eastern and southern sides. The intractable ground of the great Wealden Forest to the west has, historically, tended to create a natural landward barrier serving to isolate the region from other southern counties.

Conversely, the sea has always allowed regular movement of peoples, materials and ideas around the coast and also across the English Channel and the North Sea from mainland Europe. Over the centuries, however, in addition to peaceful traders and settlers, these same seas have also conveyed raiders and would-be invaders. The waters surrounding Kent have thus not only acted as an important communications artery but also as a defensive barrier and, on more than one occasion, a battle ground. What follows is a general overview of defending the shores of Kent during the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods.

The Roman Period

The first major military actions in Kent for which there is any sound record are the two successive landings of the great Roman general Gaius Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC. Virtually all the known details come from Caesar’s personal war diaries. Where Caesar’s forces actually landed has been long discussed but it is now generally agreed that it was somewhere on the coast of east Kent. It remains a disappointing fact, however, that there is no sound archaeological evidence for any of Caesar’s documented activities in Britain. Accordingly, we cannot much improve on what Caesar himself tells us. Concerning his first arrival in 55 BC he records that:

Scholarship on the maritime economy of medieval Kent has focused largely on the overseas trade of individual ports, although of late there has been more interest in marine fishing and coastal communities, especially on Romney Marsh. The special privileges and strategic importance of the Cinque Ports have also drawn much attention. Rather less emphasis has been placed on ‘maritime industry’, here defined as collecting and processing resources from the sea or the manufacture and maintenance of the infrastructure needed to facilitate exploitation of the sea’s resources. This chapter summarises the main patterns of overseas trade in Kent and sketches the types and economic impact of such maritime industries as marine fishing, shipbuilding, and harbour works, primarily in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. While documentary research takes centre stage, evidence from recent archaeological publications is also crucial in enriching our understanding of maritime trade and industry in medieval Kent.

Maritime Trade

To assess the volume and value of overseas trade in medieval England, scholars turn first to the enrolled customs accounts of the royal exchequer, which record totals by customs jurisdiction for wool exports from 1279 and for other cargoes from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. Calculating any totals for Kent’s overseas trade, however, is hazardous since the county’s ports can appear under five different customs headport jurisdictions. Gravesend and other Kent ports on the Thames, for example, were always included under the totals for London, while the stretch of coast from Gravesend to Sandwich usually appeared under Sandwich, except for periods when Queenborough or Dover were reckoned as headports. Trade through the south Kent ports of Hythe and New Romney could be entered in the Sandwich customs accounts, but in many years they were recorded with Chichester. These record-keeping practices must be taken into consideration in attempts to evaluate trends in the overseas trade of Kent.

The best way to distinguish commercial traffic in individual ports is by consulting the so-called particular customs accounts, which offer detailed accounts of each ship’s cargoes and merchants. But particular accounts have their own problems because their survival is sporadic, they often record only certain types of trade depending on the custom being collected, and the accounts for Kentish ports frequently omit the name and home port of the ship.

For Kent, as a maritime county, fishing has been a paramount industry for millennia. The rich estuarine and marine waters, both coastal and deep-sea, offered a range of opportunities to catch a variety of species throughout the year. Moreover, the proximity of London and northern France, especially English Calais during the late medieval and early Tudor periods, as well as the county’s large number of urban communities, provided extensive markets for fresh and processed fish through the network of local and foreign ripiers. Nevertheless, such opportunities were matched by the dangers and uncertainties the fishermen experienced. Even though industrialisation has reduced some of the dangers, fishing remains a precarious occupation, while the size and distribution of fish stocks have always been subject to climatic and other natural factors, as well as matters such as over-fishing. Consequently, over the centuries those involved have had to adopt strategies, both regarding their own livelihoods and those of their families and communities more widely, and where possible have sought to aid succeeding generations.

For the fishermen and mariners of Hythe on Kent’s southern coast, this must have been especially apparent in the early fifteenth century following a catastrophic disaster when a hundred men were lost at sea. The town, too, continued to suffer from outbreaks of plague that also deeply affected the local population, and, as Jenny Kermode showed, it was rare for merchant families in urban communities to survive for more than three generations during the late Middle Ages. In addition, Hythe, like other south-eastern ports, was experiencing serious coastal problems due to longshore drift, and work to try to maintain its haven was a continuing struggle (see Kowaleski, this volume) at a time when the country’s western ports were beginning to expand their fishing operations. Taking account of these challenging conditions, this study of Hythe’s fifteenth-century fishermen and their families explores the livelihood and inheritance practices of members of the Stace family in the context of their peers as they sought to maintain their place in the industry.

The civic authorities of medieval Hythe were keen to retain the town’s rights and privileges as one of the Cinque Ports (see Draper, this volume), which at times brought them into conflict with their archiepiscopal overlord.

There has been no published maritime history of Kent, which is surprising considering the importance and variety of the county’s maritime heritage. The focus for Kent’s history is more often on the county’s wider role as the thoroughfare between London and the Continent, as the ‘Garden of England’ supplying fruit and vegetables to London and other large cities, as one of the major early industrial counties with its Wealden iron and the cloth industry, or as the home of the Anglican Church at Canterbury.

This book seeks to redress that balance. It is not meant to be a comprehensive maritime history of Kent but does cover a wide variety of subject areas from prehistory to the contemporary. These include the influence of topography, Kent’s unique and important role in the development of the Royal Navy, the evolution of maritime communities, the impact of different races and cultures, and the role of women. There are both local and national perspectives to illustrate how Kent, as a maritime and coastal county, has had a unique and significant impact on the history of this country, Europe and the world.

As Chapter 2 explains, Kent’s topography has been a key factor in the county’s development and maritime importance. It juts out into the sea at the point where the North Sea meets the English Channel and so is surrounded by perhaps the most important stretch of water in the United Kingdom. Its southern coast faces the Channel, which has been a major route for seaborne traffic over hundreds of years, and to the north the Kent coast forms the southern boundary of the Thames Estuary, the gateway to London. In total the coastline is 202 miles long, one of the longest in England, with eight of the thirteen historic boroughs in the county bordering the sea. The narrow strait between Dover and Calais is the shortest sea crossing from the UK to continental Europe at just twenty-one miles.

This unique position, particularly the close proximity to both London and continental Europe, has meant that the county has been of strategic maritime importance since the Romans landed in 55 BC.

On the first Ordnance Survey Map of 1801 the coastal communities of Kent were very much still small, seaward, estuarine or riverine looking and working. Starting with the London boroughs still within the administrative and political county of Kent, Deptford, then the largest town in the county, was a countryside away from the smaller London communities of Rotherhithe and Peckham, and from Lewisham on the very edge of Kent. Woolwich was primarily an important naval dockyard with its ancillary works and services, and the next coastal village was several miles downstream at Erith, with the first significant town not until Gravesend. In 1801 a reader of Daniel Defoe’s 1720s Tour would instantly recognise this barely changed landscape:

But as J. B. Harley, the author of the introduction to Margary’s facsimile map, explains, by the 1820s London had spread along the river, increasingly moving inland as well, so that from Rotherhithe to Woolwich only the natural topography of marshes, heath and hills interrupted the urban developments. Population growth in England and Wales and urban development accelerated, albeit sometimes spasmodically, throughout the nineteenth century in response to numerous factors, principally the various innovations which led to changes in the ratio of births to deaths, industrialisation, urbanisation and migration. Kent was one of the beneficiaries with its established maritime role, naval and mercantile, supportive industries and agriculture, and the attraction of new holiday resorts accessible from London. By the 1850s and 1860s the railways had increased the opportunities for trade, tourism and commuting. Major changes to population density were seen in the Medway towns with the expansion of Gillingham and Chatham, and further east, as the Swale Estuary widened out to merge with the North Sea at Whitstable, the old town on the hill was gradually joined to the vibrant harbour area already extending from the waterside inland to the new toll road to Canterbury at Borstal Hill.

Kent’s strategic importance to England, and then Britain, ensures that the county’s maritime history invariably has national significance. The wide-ranging essays in this volume, spanning a period from the Roman landings in 55 BC to the present, demonstrate that the maritime history of Kent is a dynamic focus of discussion illuminating modern developments. Chris Young’s topographical preface resonates with current environmental concerns. An unbroken land mass joined south-east England to France until around 450,000 years ago, and since then Kent’s coastline has seen immense and long-term changes. It is surprising to learn, for instance, that in Roman times the Kent cliff line was at least 500m further offshore than today, the sea level being some 4m lower. David Killingray returns to this theme: rising sea levels due to global warming now threaten low-lying coastal regions of Kent, and their communities.

Successive essays yield other fascinating and little-known facts that help to place Kent’s characteristics in a historical context. For example, we learn that by the end of the third century, Kent could boast the largest concentration of fortifications anywhere in Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall. Already, by the early fourteenth century, Kent’s maritime defences were so strategically important that the county was recognised as the ‘key to England’. Forts and defensive works continued to be built or enlarged into the mid-nineteenth century, not least to protect the major royal dockyards at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham and Portsmouth. And we learn from Andrew Lambert that Kent’s defences were also needed to help the Royal Navy maintain its dominance in the English Channel, the North Sea and sometimes the Baltic regions. References in this volume to the rapid industrial expansion that occurred around Kent’s coastline from the nineteenth century, much of it related to the nation’s energy needs, also give historical context to the wind farms now extending over the Kentish Flats off Whitstable.

Kent’s coastal communities were clearly resilient and capable of adapting to change. Unhealthy marshlands were inhabited early on because they offered good conditions for salt production as well as pasturing. From the Middle Ages, changes to the shoreline made access to the port of Sandwich increasingly difficult but residents persevered; Sandwich continued to be a centre of maritime trade and a useful communications link to the Continent until the early sixteenth century.

On 4 September 1707 the London newspaper, Post Boy, carried the following advertisement:

Similar notices, common in eighteenth-century British newspapers, raise interesting questions about individual lives, communities, and understandings of race and place. Who was ‘Prince’? Did he have another name? How did he get to Kent, and what was his status in Deal? Why did Prince run away? What can we infer from the scattered references to his scarred body, his belongings, and his ‘Master’? Broader questions arise about contemporary labour relationships, about the network of locations mentioned, and other Black people then living in Kent. Prince cannot have packed much and he probably possessed few goods, given his status, and the success of his escape would depend on unfettered speed and motion. But the report of his flight leaves plenty to unpack about how the histories of diverse peoples, maritime spaces, and imperial exchanges entangled communities in Kent.

There is no firm evidence in the advertisement that Prince was enslaved. A handful of Black people in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain were referred to as ‘slaves’, having been brought into the country by colonial planters from the Americas, who often continued to treat them as such. English law was ambiguous on the status and rights of Black people in England.

When Philippe II, king of France, captured the duchy of Normandy from King John in 1204, the strategic balance in the English Channel was permanently transformed. From Dieppe to La Rochelle, the entire continental coastline now lay firmly under French control, threatening England’s dominance as the ‘principal naval and maritime power in the northern seas’. For Kent, the long-term ramifications of this geopolitical shift were equally far-reaching in terms of its strategic significance. The county, for instance, was no longer secure. Just twenty-one miles separated Dover from the French-controlled harbour at Calais. If wind and tide were favourable, an invasion fleet could cross within a single day. All 350 miles of the Kentish coastline, especially the section running from Dungeness to Pegwell Bay, were vulnerable to cross-channel raids, which could be launched without warning from continental ports like Boulogne. The county’s geographical proximity to France also ensured that the Dover Straits became the primary conduit for England’s transmarine lines of communication with its continental allies, as alternative routes from more westerly Channel ports were highly susceptible to interdiction. Commerce too became increasingly hazardous as enemy privateers, now operating from formerly friendly ports like Dieppe, attacked English shipping.

Given Kent’s position on the proverbial frontline and its vulnerability to transmarine assault, the Crown devoted considerable effort and resources on maintaining its maritime defences. But before an analysis of these measures is undertaken, consideration must be given to what is actually meant by the term ‘maritime defence’. One definition could be the ‘protection of coasts and ports, together with any shipping in adjacent waters, by such naval … forces allotted to this purpose’. Yet its scope is far broader than just coastal defence, potentially encompassing any governmental policies/programmes, logistics, operational activities and physical structures intended to protect a seacoast and its surrounding waters. Command hierarchies that issued and executed orders, for instance, controlling either the disposition of counter-invasion forces along the shoreline or the handling of a fleet at sea, would fall within this definition. So too would the vessels and crews that patrolled the Channel to safeguard the coastline during invasion scares or to enforce trade embargoes.

The culmination of the conquest of the island of Tenerife in 1496 concluded the process of European territorial dominion of the Canary Islands, with the incorporation of this island under the royal jurisdiction of the Crown of Castile. At the time, before the impact of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas was fully felt, the archipelago already held an essential strategic position in the maritime traffic of the south Atlantic, the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’, as described in maritime historiography. In this context of the inception of colonisation, the insular port system developed from very early on to become a space offering essential connections to the exterior, both in import and export processes; it was also crucial for the military provision of fleets frequenting the African coastline, and to the consolidation of the American route. In the following decades, with the exponential and rapid growth of maritime traffic between Europe, Africa and America, the islands further consolidated their geostrategic significance, to become an essential enclave within this tricontinental navigation.

Being an island territory, all connections, those of Tenerife in particular, and of the other islands in general, were done by sea. In this sense, it is important to underline that during those initial stages, port infrastructures were part of a much wider set of infrastructures of all sorts; these had to be put in place if the islands were to be inhabited and exploited to European socioeconomic standards. This makes the Canarian case an exceptional model for analysis, where, rather than witnessing a gradual process of maritimisation, the crucial importance of maritime communications for the whole territory suggests privileged investments and interventions in those spaces. However, as we shall see in the following pages, throughout the sixteenth century, interisland, intra-island and exterior maritime traffic developed under deficient material conditions.

On 8 February 1526, after a troubled six-month voyage, the ship Conceição arrived in São Tomé. On board, in deplorable conditions, it carried 466 slaves bought on behalf of the island's contractors in the Kingdom of Congo. En route, eighty-nine were buried at sea, victims of illness, hunger, accidents and the ultimate and desperate means to avoid captivity: suicide.

In a less dramatic tone, this chapter deals with the same topic: the Atlantic Slave Trade. I will analyse a slightly later chronology, the second half of the sixteenth century, and approach the subject from a different perspective: the ports of northern Portugal and their participation in this business, one of the most conspicuous in the history of the early modern era. The main objective is to identify, describe and analyse the slave-trade logistics mobilised by these ports.

This topic remains generally untapped in Portuguese and European historiography, which for a long time has concentrated exclusively on major ports such as Lisbon or Seville. However, when looking at port traffic of the early modern period on the northern coast of Portugal, the slave trade was one of the major business pursuits and became the driving force behind the vigorous new port dynamics.

Nearly fifty years ago, Herman Van Der Wee and Theo Peeters presented the concentration of much of the economic activity in a small number of ports as one of the explanations for the crisis of the late Middle Ages. Since then, historiography has not paid due attention to the efforts of port societies to build strong port infrastructures and improve port services, these efforts being some of the most important factors for the revitalisation of the European economy from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. This volume offers such material: transport and port infrastructures, cargo handling, labour groups and port services help us understand the reasons for their success.

From Antiquity, cities have emerged along the littoral, with few regions in the world ever being totally self-sufficient. As the Latin name portus reveals, these are gateways from the sea to land allowing for the flow of merchandise, people, knowledge and, also, disease and violence. The benefits – and drawbacks – derived thereof were numerous. With seaborne traffic being much faster and more direct than overland transport, the main benefit was the supply of commodities to the population. During Antiquity, the proximity of the sea to a city did have adverse consequences. As Plato describes in his Laws dialogue, cities should be located at a distance of 80 stadia from the sea to counteract the inherent dangers of maritime cities, namely the influence of foreign customs, the drive for gain and profit, corruption and the inclination for travelling and venturing overseas:

In his Politics, Aristotle does not hold such a negative view of port cities. In his view, ports of transit are necessary for subsistence, commercial and military purposes; he does, however, oppose the development of a city into an emporium.