Romney comprised Lydd, Dungeness, Eastweston, and Promwell; Hythe took in merely West Hythe, and to Hastings belonged the remote and completely inland village of Bekesbourne.
The story of the Cinque Ports is, above all else, an object-lesson in the supreme, although generally unacknowledged, importance of the trading, or middle classes, without whose enterprising activities and courage and resource the nation long since would have ceased to exist. It has always been convenient to ignore the services to the community performed by traders, who on the one hand give employment and on the other pay the greater proportion of rates and taxes, and from whose enriched families the failing and impoverished aristocracy has throughout the centuries been recruited.
Although, as already said, the idea of the Cinque Ports confederation goes back into dim antiquity, we have few early facts. The first Warden of whom we have any certain information is John de Fiennes, in the time of William the Conqueror, and the earliest charter extant is that of 1277, the sixth year of the reign of Edward the First. By that document we learn something of the status and scope of this remarkable association. Those ports were among the richest communities at that time within the kingdom. They no longer suffered, as of yore, from pirates, although they were the first to feel the vengeance of the foreigner when war broke out; and thus they were not so immediately concerned as of old in guarding their own shores. But the King in those times, before such a thing as a royal navy had come into existence, had need of ships wherewith to conduct his foreign wars, and the merchant-vessels of Sandwich, of Dover, and of these other maritime communities were the only craft then available. Not even in those high-handed feudal times was it possible to seize ships at will; some centuries earlier a compact had been made with the ports, which were then definitely associated. They undertook to supply vessels, according to their relative importance. Thus under Henry the Third, in 1229, the Cinque Ports, as a whole, were to furnish fifty-seven ships, each with a crew of twenty-one men and a boy (a “gromet,” or “garcion,” as he was called) for fifteen days, at their own cost; and as long afterwards as might be required, on pay. The varied importance of the contributory ports seems to be reflected in the ships each then contracted to supply towards the tally. Thus Dover is set down for twenty-one; Winchelsea ten; Hastings six; and Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Rye five each.