In 1744, The Mermaid Inn was teeming with open secrets. Bands of rowdy, weather-beaten, sea-faring men would tumble in late at night, rest their pistols on the table, and wait for their tankards to be filled to the brim. Risk-averse regulars would swiftly filter out, wending their way home down cobbled streets while the notorious new arrivals settled in for the long haul.

There were no last orders for this lot—the Hawkhurst Gang was untouchable. They'd bent the town of Rye to their will through fear and force, becoming one of England's most notorious ring of smugglers. Even if only a fraction of the stories about Arthur Gray and his butchers were true, that was enough to keep most people at arm's length.

At the Mermaid, Rye’s oldest pub—where pipe smoke stained the wooden beams, years of nicotine yellowed and preserved Shakespearean paintings on the wall, and the wide, roaring hearth battled with cold draughts ebbing in from the windy streets outside—people minded their own business.

"The cellars here are nearly 900 years old—they've been carbon-tested. Even back then, we were a smugglers’ inn," says Judith Blincow, the current owner of the 31-bedroom pub hotel. She's been working here for 43 years, starting as a receptionist and working her way up. She and her late partner Bob Pinwill took over in 1993 after the previous landlord went bankrupt; they remortgaged their house, sold virtually everything they owned, and outbid secretive investors from Germany and the United States to secure the deal.

““Anyone hiding here could be on a ship to France in minutes.””

Judith’s enthusiasm for the pub’s rich history is infectious; the hour or so I spend with her is a bouncing, weaving tour of the 15th-century building, with its innumerate nooks and crannies, cramped passageways, creaking staircases, and ‘open sesame’ bookcases (yes, really.) A catchphrase soon emerges: “How about this then?!” typically expelled as Judith excitedly bursts into a new room, rattling another story off the top of her head.

“We’ve discovered lots of tunnels and secret passages that the pub was built with,” Judith explains. “We had one of the deepest harbours in England at the bottom of Mermaid Street, so anyone hiding here could be on a ship to France in minutes. The Hawkhurst Gang ran from Dover through to Poole and we were one of the stop-offs. Nobody ever dared say anything against them.”

It’s no wonder; the gang was brutal. When the authorities managed to seize the tea, wool, or brandy that had been shipped in tax-free, footsoldiers and ringleaders alike had no qualms about raiding customs houses or murdering riding officers to get it back. If someone spoke out of turn or unwillingly threatened a gang member, things could get dark quickly. The fate of Daniel Chater—a shoemaker who was kidnapped, beaten, and thrown down a well on his way to visit a Justice of the Peace to identify a gang member called Diamond—proves it.

Ultimately, this brutality led to the gang’s downfall. Smuggling created work and allowed locals to get hold of valuable goods, so townsfolk were often happy to turn a blind eye to shady dealings. Ruthless violence, on the other hand, tended to alienate people. As the customs men grew in stature, they were empowered by increased local support. In 1749, in the wake of a particularly grisly armed robbery in Poole, the Hawkhurst gang’s ringleaders were finally rounded up and executed.

***

There's a reason why Rye, an almost excessively picturesque medieval town hugging the border between East Sussex and Kent, became a haven for smuggling. It may now be known as a quaint, affluent, tourist-charming weekend destination, filled with overhanging Tudor timber and tight alleyways that slither uphill, but historically it had huge strategic significance nationally.

Originally raised on a rock promontory with the sea on three sides, Rye was once England's busiest port, a bridge between Britain and continental Europe. This is England’s frontier.

The town was a centre for trade, both legal and illegal. Today, historians are skeptical of certain rumours about the network of tunnels and passages winding beneath the town’s cobbled streets and creaking medieval inns. Dr. Chris Moore, an expert in Tudor architecture at the University of Kent, tells me, “there are also a lot of myths regarding the levels of smuggling, and how much it informed architecture coastally,” while James Wright's Medieval Mythbusting blog writes “some of the claims made about [the Mermaid] are perhaps suspect.”

““This is England’s frontier.””

That being said, there’s no doubt that smuggling profoundly shaped this town and its pubs. And illicit trade didn't flourish in Rye by chance. The historical presence of smuggling in the town is inextricably linked to Rye's historical status as a member of the Confederation of the Cinque Ports.

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Founded when Britain possessed no official regular navy, the Confederation of the Cinque Ports was a group of well-positioned ports and affiliated towns in the south-east of England tasked with providing vital naval protection to England's most at-risk borders. Usually pronounced ‘sink ports’—like a belligerent uncle refusing to bow to continental airs—the organisation was at its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries, and its title reflects the anglicised version of Norman French being spoken in towns like Rye when they were first settled.

The stretch of coastline connecting Faversham in northern Kent with Hastings in East Sussex has always been Britain's most vulnerable piece of land. It was the object of drooling fantasies from prospective invaders over the years as diverse as Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.

To combat constant threats of invasion, England’s medieval rulers asked the ports to assemble and maintain naval fleets that could spring into action when necessary, providing stability and protection across the region. But they wouldn’t do it free of charge. In exchange for this protection, the Confederation of the Cinque Ports members were handed some massive perks.

“The dependence of the monarch on the goodwill and cooperation of the Cinque Ports confederation resulted in the charter of the late twelfth century which liberated Rye from the administrative demands of the county and hundred,” writes Gillian Draper in Rye: A History of a Sussex Cinque Port.

The list of privileges handed to the Cinque Ports in charters of this period is remarkable. In exchange for providing the Crown with a set number of ships each year, the Ports were given:

Exemption from tax and tallage
Rights of sac and soc (jurisdiction over criminal and civil cases)
Rights of toll and team (authority over the sale and transportation of cattle and other property)
Rights of bloodwit and fledwit (authority to punish "shedders of blood")
Rights of pillory and tumbril (the right to punish delinquents)
Rights of infangthief and outfangthief (authority to imprison or execute thieves)
The right of mundbryce (entering private property in order to erect coastal defences)
Rights of waifs and strays (authority to appropriate unclaimed property and stray animals)
Rights of flotsam, jetsam and ligan (authority to claim debris and cargo from wrecked ships)

You can see how things got out of control. According to Draper, “the men of Rye and other members of the Cinque Ports confederation often turned to piracy after periods when their ships had been required in conflicts or to deliver provisions to Gascony, Calais or Scotland…” Prominent townsfolk like the 15th-century MP William Long were known to have smuggled goods into the town to avoid paying customs.

““There’s a Sussex motto: ‘We wunt be druv’.””

— Simon Parsons, Rye Heritage Centre

“The wealth of the town, and the poverty of the town, has been cyclical with the requirements for the navy and the Cinque Ports Confederation themselves,” says Simon Parsons, who runs Rye Heritage Centre. I visit when the museum is about to reopen with a new exhibition about the historic pubs of Rye, and Simon soon starts emphasising the important relationship between politics and pubs throughout the ages.

“In the times of the rotten boroughs [when constituencies with very few voters sent multiple MPs to Parliament], Rye had two MPs,” he explains, reflecting on the disproportionate power given to Cinque Ports towns. “There was lots of corruption—the prospective MPs would visit the pubs and ply their prospective voters with lots of beer before elections.”

“When booze was affordable, community life was centred around the pubs, and everybody had their local,” he continues. “Life up until the beginning of the 20th century was hard, so your outlet was drink.”

***

The Mermaid is a reminder that some of our best museums are our pubs. Sitting in the inn’s foyer, the peaceful trickle of a stone fountain drifts in from a square courtyard at the centre of the building. Years ago, Judith encountered a 98-year-old man whose childhood job was to pull water from a well beneath this fountain; later, an architect confirmed that the building had been structured around the water supply in order to prevent it from being poisoned by neighbours.

The flow of water also runs down to the Old Bell, another medieval smugglers’ tavern located just down the road. According to Judith, “There's a very large drain that goes from the corner of our bar down to the Old Bell, which we think used to be an old tunnel that was turned into the mains drains. In the middle of the foyer, there's a 9ft-by-4ft underground void with one side cut and a slope, and [architects] reckon that was to gently lower your barrels down so they didn't smash at the bottom.”

In the unique space of the public house—with its endless invitations for storytelling, and the constant entrance of new characters and ideas — collections of anecdotes like this are stitched organically together over time in a way few other institutions could dream of. For the modern drinker, it’s paradise.

Nestle in the Giant’s Fireplace Bar at The Mermaid for half an hour with a fresh pint of Kent brewery Pig & Porter's specially-made Mermaid Ale—a delicate 3.4% bitter that softly mingles malted milk biscuits with a ripple of citrus—and you'll hear sipping speculations like “What's that old recipe on the wall?” and “How old are those swords hanging over the fireplace?”

Stroll down the hill to the Rye Waterworks Micropub (“it's no more than two minutes' walk between any pub in the town,” Simon tells me) and you'll be sucked into another deeply historic (if slightly less glamorous) old site. This thriving community boozer opened in 2018 inside an early 18th-century pump house, which formerly used a donkey-operated pump to feed water from nearby streams up to the town's churchyard cistern. Now it supplies beer, brewed a mile away in the village of Playden.

“The Waterworks is the friendliest pub in Rye,” Simon tells me. “It's run by a chap called Dave Roder, and he's spot on at what he does. You're encouraged to sit at a table and talk to strangers, and it's one of those pubs that buzzes after work from about half past five until about half past eight.”

When I visit on a crisp, sunny afternoon at the tail end of winter, the place is full within an hour of opening. Scribbled on the extensive chalkboard beer list are two near-permanent cask fixtures, UrRYEnal and IPA (I Pee A Lot). The former is an extremely sessional copper-coloured bitter, while the latter utilises English hops for grassy bitterness and comes in on the lighter end of the IPA spectrum at 4.4%.

The beers’ names might be a laugh, but by tapping into the memories of this 300-year-old space, they're yet another example of the connection Rye’s modern pub-goers have to the town's heritage.

Drinking spaces are always being reclaimed and reinvented—just look at how landlord Jeff Bell has turned Rye's picturesque 17th-century tavern the Ypres Castle Inn into a haven for progressive political discussion. But buried in the walls, there are heavy nods to past pioneers.

Dr. Chris Moore’s research often centres around uncovering these stories by digging into architectural quirks. For example, when he learned that The Mermaid's central chimney is made from Caen stone (a type of limestone quarried in northern France and usually shipped to England to construct religiously symbolic buildings like Canterbury Cathedral,) he was immediately intrigued.

“Caen stone is basically a religious stone used to construct most of our big cathedrals, it would not have been used on a pub,” he explains. “So that's probably Reformation stone from a dissolved monastery close to Rye that’s been reused. There’s symbolism to that; did the landlord make a conscious decision to go ‘It's a shame that monastery’s been destroyed, let’s keep a bit of it in the pub’?”

That human tendency to hang pieces of personality on the spaces we inhabit also relates to the ongoing power of the smugglers’ tavern as an image. The mythologisation of places like the Mermaid or the Old Bell show the special, mystical status of smuggling in our national psyche.

Despite its brutality, smuggling has been glamourised and explored endlessly in our literature and folklore—it fascinates us. As Paul Theroux writes in The Kingdom By The Sea, “smuggling was fun, smuggling was blameless, smuggling was British… the thievery was boasted about and romanticised until it seemed a kind of heroism.”

Perhaps the reason the English love smuggling so much is that generally, we are a nation with little trust in the authorities, but with even less desire to practically alter the state of things ourselves. For that reason, we respect and admire those who make good on their disdain for central government and have the courage to bypass the rules we complain about.

“Getting around the taxman, ducking and diving for a living, two fingers up to the establishment—that plays into the pioneering spirit of island-dwelling nations,” agrees Chris. “Look at the way smugglers and pirates are portrayed in popular art, it's romantic. In reality, they were just gangsters and thugs like the Krays.”

However the old smugglers are viewed, it’s hard to underestimate the impact this practice, and the Cinque Ports charters that encouraged it, has had on the pub culture and social fabric of towns like Rye. “There's a Sussex motto: 'We wunt be druv’,” Simon tells me, reflecting on the region's anti-authority gaze. “We'll find our way around it.”

But there's one thing Rye has never been able to find its way around: geography. Just as this rocky outcrop's natural defences helped spark up a settlement in the first place, the ebbs and flows of the sea eventually ended Rye’s status as a nationally significant port, a naval outpost, and a smugglers’ haven.

The harbour silted up in the Tudor period, and large vessels could no longer anchor by the town. Attempts to build a new harbour at nearby Winchelsea Beach in the 19th century failed. Today, the shoreline is two miles away, the ships are long gone, and the role of the Cinque Ports Confederation is purely ceremonial.

What remains in Rye is a thriving pub scene that rivals that of any similar-sized town in the UK. Places like The Mermaid, The Old Bell, and The Standard are a history lover's dream, but they don't let that heavy heritage paint over the need for friendly service, cosy, well-appointed bars, and high-quality local cask beer.

Meanwhile, establishments like the Waterworks and the Ypres Castle Inn don't allow their broad, well-balanced beer selections to distract from the primary function of the public house: conversation, social cohesion, and finding a home away from home.

“In my youth, Rye was a drinking town, and that culture's still there,” Simon tells me. “Someone relatively famous once described Rye as ‘a rock in the sea with a thousand alcoholics clinging to it’—the culture of Rye has always been about drinking.”