1921 THE CORUNNA PACKETS 525 the patriotic feeling against French competition was unusually high, the owling trade showed unaccustomed vigour. In 1698/9 it was thought by the best authorities to have reached * near 2,000 sacks per annum ever since this war, each sack containing 240 lbs.' * The very name of ■ owling ' seems to date from this time. A poet ' of facetious memory ' expressed the view of the government in the couplet : To gibbet and gallow's your owlers advance, That, that 's the sure way to mortifie France. 2 The great centre of the trade was in Romney Marsh, and in 1690 the privy council ordered the justices of Kent to take measures there, and arranged for ships to cruise off the Kent coast to prevent it. In 1693 soldiers were quartered at Lydd to put it down. In 1696 it occasioned a riot in Rye. In 1697 the clothiers of Welling- ton in Somerset petitioned against it, and, shortly after the signature of peace, three sloops were ordered out for this service. Not until 1699 did Narcissus Luttrell record that it had been 1 in a manner ' suppressed. 3 The progress of the government's action about enemy trade seems to show, for the first three years of the war, nothing but a determination to enforce strictly the policy of 1689, except for the reasonable modifications which, as we have seen, they tried to obtain from parliament. Experience suggested certain im- provements. It was forbidden for ships without a special exempting licence to leave the Channel except under convoy or on their way to the rendezvous of a convoy. 4 A new act was passed in 1690/1 for the more effectual execution of the act of 1689. 5 This defined more closely the offences of customs officers and the offences of vendors under the former act, and it imposed fresh penalties for a kind of offence which it stated to have occurred, the violent disturbing of informers and officers and the forcible importation of French wares by ' companies and multitudes of men '. It was in vain that the Vintners Company petitioned against the stricter definition of the offences of sales. 6 Equally unsuccessful for the time was an attempt 1 Representation of the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, 13/23 January 1698/9 (CO. 390. 12, Public Record Office. There is a transcript in Brit. Mus., Harl. MS. 1324). The original was formerly known as Board of Trade, Trade Papers, 23). 8 New English Diet., s. v. ' owler ' and ' owling ', and Tom Brown, Collected Poems (1701), there cited. 8 Privy Council Register, 13/23 February 1689/90, 21/31 August 1690, 28 April/ 8 May 1692,16/26 November 1693, 26 March/5 April, 20/30 August 1696, 31 December/ 10 January 1696/7 ; 16/26 September, 21/31 October, 17/27 November 1697 ; Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation, iv. 548.
- Privy Council Register, 4/14 November 1689.
s 2 William and Mary, sess. 2, c. 14 (Statutes of the Realm, vi. 247). It received the royal assent on 5/15 January 1690/1. 6 House of Lords Papers, 1690-1, pp. 252 f.
