A subsidiary court of the Cinque Ports, inferior to the Court of Shepway, was in remote times held in the open air on Dymchurch beach. This was the “Court of Brodhull,” and was later removed to Romney. Shepway Court also was an open-air assembly, presided over by the Lord Warden. Here offenders were tried upon charges of high treason, failure of ship-service, false judgment, and treasure-trove. Process upon conviction was summary. Convicted disturbers of the King’s peace, debasers of coin, and plunderers of ships or ships’ gear to the value of twenty pence were at once drawn around Shepway on hurdles and afterwards hanged. An even more terrible fate awaited any jurat disclosing the King’s counsel, his fellows and his own. He was bound hand and foot to a stake set upon the seashore where the tide ebbed and flowed, his throat was cut, and his tongue drawn out through the slit. The Lord Warden was always, from the earliest times, sworn in at the Court of Shepway upon his appointment. The first Lord Warden was Earl Godwin. This ceremony continued here until 1597, when Lord Cobham took the oath at Bekesbourn. Meanwhile the business of the ancient Court had been transferred to Dover. The composition of this open-air assembly was, the Lord Warden, with the Mayor of Sandwich on his right and the Mayor of Dover on his left; on the right of the Mayor of Sandwich, the Mayor of Hastings; and the Mayors of Romney, and Hythe, Winchelsea and Rye, Faversham, Folkestone, or Fordwich, Lydd, Pevensey or Seaford, and Tenterden, respectively in succession, right and left. [Illustration: LYMPNE.] At Shepway Cross, on the hill-top, we turn left into Lympne, which was once pronounced locally as a two-syllabled word, “Limn-ey”; obviously derived from the old Roman _Lemanis_. How or why the intruding “p” came into the place-name is unknown, and cannot be traced back further than Morden’s map of Kent, about 1680.