Among many masters the corporation was kept in a perpetual ferment. The boundaries of its territory were not finally decided till 1462, and the quarrel with Battle on this point kept lawyers and town clerks busy hurrying backwards and forwards between London and Lydd, or riding to Canterbury to get the Abbot’s charter, or to Winchelsea to meet the Abbot’s counsel.[795] For a hundred years moreover the town kept up the long struggle to free itself from the supremacy of Romney. Already in 1384 deputations from both the towns met in Dover to discuss the terms of agreement between them with the Warden, and from that time lawyers were kept constantly at work, and a counsel seems to have been permanently employed in London, besides the deputations of bailiff, common clerk, and jurats sent there as well as to Dover, Sandwich, or Canterbury, and the messengers despatched with “courtesies” for the Lieutenant, the Seneschal, or the Clerk of Dover Castle, the Mayor and Clerk of Dover town, the Archbishop of Canterbury and his steward, the Common Clerk of Winchelsea and so on; while the salary of the Town Clerk, Thomas Caxton, probably a brother of the great printer, was raised again and again, so as to secure the services of the most skilful lawyer and able administrator in all the country round.[796] Even in a trifling matter of taxation it was not till 1490 that the town was able to make a composition for a fixed yearly payment.[797]
IV. In the same way Sandwich had the mastery of the little town of Fordwich,[798] which lay fifteen miles higher up the river and claimed dominion over a tiny territory reaching back from the water’s edge on either side as far as a man in a boat on the river could throw an axe of seven pounds called “Taperaxe.” The inhabitants elected every year a mayor, treasurer, and jurats to govern them and preserve the liberties of the town. The mayor with a black knotted stick as badge of his office, held his court of justice. He appointed every year four freemen to act as arbitrators in case of trespass, and if any townsman refused to accept their decision or tried to carry the cause to another court, he was fined the enormous sum of a hundred shillings, or thrown for a year into the town prison, a filthy hole of nine feet square which still exists. In capital cases the mayor could give sentence of death, and order the prosecutor if he won his suit to carry the condemned criminal to the “Thefeswell” and himself throw him into it with hands and feet tied, “knebent” as it was called.[799]