Civic body · also Court & law
Romney level wall court
Also called Romney level (wall and drainage body) · the wall-reeve · the levels · the trust · the wall men · court of the levels
A self-governing body of Romney Marsh landholders who keep the sea wall and drains. They elect officers, levy a rate by the foot of frontage, and hold a court at Snargate that can enter land, order work and distrain. No charter created it, it predates every other marsh authority, and it keeps the roads and the single bridge.
The court the marsh landholders elected themselves to keep the sea wall that holds a quarter of the county dry. It can enter any man's ground and distrain for its rate, though no charter ever constituted it.
Named with it
- Wall-Reeve Osbert Appledore
At the table
In storm weeks the wall-reeve has put a hundred men onto the Romney level four times in eleven years; wall men will not come for anybody during a storm week. The wall-reeve can order a hundred men onto the wall overnight. It hires bands already known to it for storm weeks (muster at Snargate) and dislikes strangers walking the dykes. Its two-hundred-year record of trench obstructions is the only systematic record of the drowned villages, and no one has read it.