Among these powerful and terrorising confederacies, the Hawkhurst gang was pre-eminent. The constitution of it was, necessarily, a matter of inexact information, for the officers and the rank and file of such societies are mentioned by no minute-books or reports. But one of its principals was, without question, Arthur Gray, or Grey, who was one of those “Sea Cocks” after whom Seacox Heath, near Hawkhurst, in Kent, is supposed to be named. He was a man who did things on, for those times, a grand scale, and was said to be worth £10,000. He had built on that then lonely ridge of ground, overlooking at a great height the Weald of Kent, large store houses—a kind of illicit “bonded warehouses”—for smuggled goods, and made the spot a distributing centre. That all these facts should have been contemporaneously known, and Gray’s store not have been raided by the Revenue, points to an almost inconceivable state of lawlessness. The buildings were in after years known as “Gray’s Folly”; but it was left for modern times to treat the spot in a truly sportive way: when Lord Goschen, who built the modern mansion of Seacox Heath on the site of the smuggler’s place of business, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. If the unquiet ghosts of the old smugglers ever revisit their old haunts, how weird must have been the ironic laughter of Gray at finding this the home of the chief financial functionary of the Government! [Picture: Goudhurst Church] In December 1744 the gang were responsible for the impudent abduction of a customs officer and three men who had attempted to seize a run of goods at Shoreham. They wounded the officer and carried the four off to Hawkhurst, where they tied two of them, who had formerly been smugglers and had ratted to the customs service, to trees, whipped them almost to death, and then took them down to the coast again and shipped them to France. A reward of £50 was offered, but never claimed. To exhume yet another incident from the forgotten doings of the time: In March 1745 a band of twelve or fourteen smugglers assaulted three custom-house officers whom they found in an alehouse at Grinstead Green, wounded them in a barbarous manner, and robbed them of their watches and money. In the same year a gang entered a farmhouse near Sheerness, in Sheppey, and stole a great quantity of wool, valued at £1,500. A week later £300 worth of wool, which may or may not have been a portion of that stolen, was seized upon a vessel engaged in smuggling it from Sheerness, and eight men were secured.