The picture shows Moses Shipyard where Port Ramsgate is now,
you can see a fishing smack building, on the slipway, in the yard and another
one at sea. My guess at the date is a bit of a wild one at around 1900, any
help on that front would be appreciated.
I have modified my text about the development of Ramsgate as
a port and copied it below, once again any help with inaccuracies would be
appreciated.
What I am trying to do is to avoid the repetitious quotes
from previous historians and historical sources, which make the thing boring
for those who have already read them before in numerous local history books and
write local history – as it were - from the seat of the pants.
I have had far to many rolls today, the rolls contain the
letters from the mediaeval monarchs, mostly to the lords warden of the Cinque
Ports and believe me when I say they are very long rolls indeed.
“Ramsgate
is formed by a natural valley meeting the sea through the chalk cliffs, the
oldest picture I know of that shows Ramsgate shoreline viewed from the sea, is
the 1790s print based on a drawing from the newly completed harbour.
This
natural feature means that there would have been some sort of sandy cove at
Ramsgate since prehistoric times, and it is likely sea fishing has taken place
here for millennia.
The sand
that built up in the inlet would have restricted the erosion by the sea, so the
shoreline in the harbour area has probably been in the same place since well
before Roman times.
Archaeological
digs show that there was some sort of pier, where the slipways are now, at
least as far back a roman times, as they
found roman coins there as well
as the remains of a roman pier there.
Around a
thousand years ago, when Thanet was a proper island and Sandwich was an
important port on the coast facing Thanet, King Edward the Confessor (1042 –
1066) made Sandwich a founder member of the Cinque Ports (the main English
ports).
The main
port on the south side of Thanet was Stonar, which the Abbot of St Augustine
possessed by edict of Cnut (King Canute 995 – 1035) from 1027. Sandwich was in
the hands of the Prior of Christ Church Canterbury under a similar edict from
1023.
There was
an ongoing legal battle between the two ports, for the trade, which attracted
taxes, and although a jury convened by Henry I 1127 decided the Sandwich should
get the trade and the taxes, Stonar continued to prosper until it was burnt to
the ground by the French in 1365.
The
monarch would obviously support the Cinque Port as it was the Cinque Ports that
provided the ships for fighting and defence before the formation of the navy in
the 1500s.
At the
same time Margate was described as a port in a letter from King Edward III in
the 1340s telling the bailiff there to arrest the ship owners there.
By 1422
when Ramsgate became a limb of the Cinque Port of Sandwich, the port of
Sandwich itself was starting to silt up.
The
village of St Lawrence from which Ramsgate was to grow built a chapel
in 1062 and in 1124 the chapels of St John (Margate), St Peter (Broadstairs),
St Laurence (Ramsgate) and their mother church Minster were assigned to St
Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury.
St
Laurence was consecrated as a church in 1275 with the name Ramsgate appearing in
documents, for the first time around that time.
Because
of various letters from monarchs about wall repairs, we know that defensive
walls along the coast protected the parts of Thanet protected against/from what? that weren’t protected by cliffs.
Around a
thousand years ago the hamlet of St Lawrence started to expand, towards the end
of the 1200s it had become a large enough village to have a church, such use as
the inhabitants made of the sea would have been down the valley, to what would
become Ramsgate.
There
would have been a defensive wall there with a gate to the sea and over the
period from around a thousand years ago, to around six hundred years ago, the
people from the village of St Lawrence who fished from Ramsgate would have
acquired boats, built storage sheds and eventually started to live at Ramsgate.
The use
of boats in the Ramsgate area wasn’t confined to fishing. There was a considerable amount of
what is called locally “foying”, taking provisions and recreations out toships moored off the coast, helping
ships in distress, for a fee and so on. Recovering ships’ anchors from sandbanks and selling
them to ships that had lost their
anchors, being an example.
Much
money was to be made from shipwrecks and ships belonging to enemies of the
monarch, which was fair game
although there are many letters from the monarchs between about a thousand and
about five hundred years ago, seeking redress where the men of Thanet have
taken cargoes or whole vessels from the monarchs friends.
As late
as 1488 when the Cinque Ports were waning – as a standing navy which later
became the Royal Navy was formed in the early 1500s – King Henry VII granted
Cinque Ports fishermen the armed power to fish wherever they wished in any part
of England.
Around
1500 the printing press was invented and from that time people started
producing histories of England, although frankly little was said about fishing
and agriculture, the emphasis being on the aristocracy.
The first
reference I can find to fishing off the
coast of Thanet is from William Lambarde writing in 1570 who says, the waters of our
coast provide good wholesome fish, but not in much quantity orvariety.
The next
writer to say anything about Thanet’s fishing and agriculture was William
Camden writing in 1586. He
describes the locals as very
industrious, working both as farmers and seamen.
Fishing,
farming and exporting their own produce suggests
locally owned cargo vessels.
Camden
paints a picture of pastoral
prosperity supplemented by fishing and profiting from the local shipwrecks.
However
Admiral Howard writing about Margate in 1588 portrays a very different picture
of the Thanet locals. After fighting the Spanish Armada some of the returning
ships with the sailors suffering from typhus, dysentery, scurvy and starvation,
sailed to Margate hoping for help. The sailors hadn’t been paid by the
government and when Howard arrived they were without shelter or food, and were dying in the streets.
So whether Thanet was a prosperous and civilised area by around 1600, or
whether it was brutish and poverty stricken is something that is lost to the
mists of time.”
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