Thirteen men were indicted in the Admiralty Court on October 30th, 1769, for piracy and murder on the high seas; namely, Thomas Phillips, elder and younger, William and George Phillips, Mark Chatfield, Robert Webb, Thomas and Samuel Ailsbury, James and Richard Hyde, William Geary, _alias_ Justice, _alias_ George Wood, Thomas Knight, and William Wenham, and were capitally convicted. Of these, four, Thomas Ailsbury, William Geary, William Wenham, and Richard Hyde, were hanged at Execution Dock, November 27th. The next most outstanding incident, a bloody affray which occurred on February 26th, 1780, belongs to Kent. As Mr. Joseph Nicholson, supervisor of excise, was removing to Canterbury a large seizure of geneva he had made at Whitstable, a numerous body of smugglers followed him and his escort of a corporal and eight troopers of the 4th Dragoons. Fifty of the smugglers had firearms, and, coming up with the escort, opened fire without warning or demanding their goods. Two Dragoons were killed on the spot, and two others dangerously wounded. The smugglers then loaded up the goods and disappeared. A reward of £100 was at once offered by the Commissioners of Excise, with a pardon, for informers; and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugonin, of the 4th Dragoons, offered another £50. John Knight, of Whitstable, was shortly afterwards arrested, on information received, and was tried and convicted at Maidstone Assizes. He was hanged on Penenden Heath and his body afterwards gibbeted on Borstal Hill, the spot where the attack had been made. The south held unquestioned pre-eminence, as long as smuggling activities lasted, and the records of bloodshed and hard-fought encounters are fullest along the coasts of Kent and Sussex. Sometimes, but not often, they are varied by a touch of humour. The convenience afforded by churches for the storing of smuggled goods is a commonplace of the history of smuggling; and there is scarce a seaboard church of which some like tale is not told, while not a few inland church-towers and churchyards enjoy the same reputation. Asked to account for this almost universal choice of a hiding-place by the smugglers, a parish clerk of that age supposed, truly enough, that it was because no one was ever likely to go near a church, except on Sundays. This casts an instructive side-light upon the Church of England and religion at any time from two hundred to seventy or eighty years ago.