With the decline of their especial usefulness, and with the growth everywhere of liberties, the peculiar privileges of the Cinque Ports either became anomalous or absolutely worthless, and so at length the office of Lord Warden grew more and more a mere ornamental distinction, generally conferred upon a statesman towards the close of his career. The honour is generally the coping-stone placed upon the achievements of public life. Together with the decline of this once great office, the various courts held for the conduct of Cinque Ports business have either ceased to exist or are brought into an effete and unwonted activity only on rare occasions, such as the Installation of a Lord Warden, or a coronation, when the “barons” claim their ancient rights of carrying a canopy over King and Queen. All these changes had come gradually about at the time when reform generally was in the air, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and most of these especial privileges were formally abolished by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. Sandwich was severely governed in mediæval times by its authorities, the “jurats or barons,” but not one whit more severely than other members of the Cinque Ports. The “common ordinances” proclaimed by authority of these jurats included a curious variety of enactments. No burgess was permitted to lend any money to spinners of wool on security of their wool, nor to tailors on their cloth; no dealer in fish was allowed to buy any fish in the market from a foreign fisherman, and no poulterer might purchase any poultry from a foreigner “until the better sort of people of the town had supplied themselves with what they wanted for their own use.” “Foreigner” in these cases meant merely a person who was not an inhabitant of Sandwich, not an alien. Furthermore, any person who should wound another maliciously with knife, sword, or the like, had the choice either of paying the Mayor and commonalty sixty shillings, of going to prison for a year and a day, or of having his hand perforated by the weapon with which the wound was inflicted. Any woman convicted of scolding or quarrelling in the street, or any public place, was to carry “the mortar,” a kind of pillory, through the town, beginning and ending at the pillory gate, and preceded by a piper, to whom she was to pay a penny for his music. The jurats had also power of life and death for offences that would now be considered of only a minor kind. The women condemned to die were drowned in the Guestling Brook; the men buried alive in the Thieves Dunes, near by.