Thus early were the merchants able to find a fleet for the King’s needs; and they obtained substantial return for the service. The Cinque Ports were given many valuable rights and privileges within and without their own boundaries. They were governed under a Lord Warden by a representative body of men freely chosen from each port, and were independent alike of the counties and of the King’s writ, and directly represented in Parliament and at the coronation of King and Queen. In place of the aldermen and councillors of municipal corporations, the freemen of the ports were styled “barons” and “jurats.” The right to govern one’s own affairs was not recognised in those times, and the concession granted to the freemen of the Cinque Ports was therefore of considerable value. They were, moreover, given a privilege that would be extremely valuable even now: that of trading free of toll everywhere throughout the kingdom. They were, in the words of Edward the First’s charter, “quit of all toll and custom, all lastage, tollage, passage, carriage, rivage, and pontage.” They had also the more abstruse rights of “Soc and sac, infangtheoff and utfangtheoff, wardship and marriage of heirs,” and were freed from the King’s right of prisage of imported wines. The Cinque Ports navy, thus constituted, performed great services during several centuries. It not only conveyed the King’s troops in his wars with France, and Scotland, and in his subjugations of Ireland and Wales, but fought with, and generally vanquished, foreign fleets. It was only with the gradual growth of a royal navy, from the time of Henry the Seventh, that the importance of the Cinque Ports flotilla declined. Its gradual declension was due rather to a rage for building big warships than to any decay in the ports. Much the same forces were at work then as those we see now. The Cinque Ports vessels were, in the first instance, merchantmen, and when they had performed their military service they resumed their trade. The great ships of war built by Henry the Eighth, the _Mary Rose_ and the _Harry Grace à Dieu_, were the Dreadnoughts of their age, and led to competitive building on the part of foreign Powers. Among those leviathans the trading vessels of the ports seemed insignificant; although it was left for a much later age to prove that the fishing luggers of the Kentish coast could perform useful acts; as when they were armed during the scare of Napoleon’s projected invasion, and succeeded in capturing some French gunboats and putting privateers to flight.