Coast service

The Crown revenue men of the Kentish coast: riding officers ashore, revenue officers working the estuary in pairs by daylight, and a single fast cutter on the station.

The riding officers who police smuggling ('the free trade') on the Kent coast: few, known by name, and engaged in something closer to a long negotiation than a war.

Named with it

• Riding-Officer Silas Bekesbourne · eastern shore
• Riding Officer Nicholas Warden · keeps the sufferance book, New Romney
• Riding-Officer Jane Deal · riding officer

Ties

• works alongside the Board
• respects the liberties of the chartered ports
• opposed to the free trade of the beach landings

At the table

Riding officers know the smugglers' caverns and seize what they find without looking very hard; one secretly checked a lamp in a cavern through the winter of 4591. Their standing instruction when a free trade cargo is robbed is to pursue the cargo, not the quarrel. The cutter brings a quiet season each time it takes a rover and will never beach in a gap. A stranger writing in a book on a beach is taken for a riding officer. Seizures are made but there are never witnesses. Hires bands to escort seized goods, which makes a company an enemy of every landing.