The Cinque Ports. By Montagu Burrows. (Longman, Green, and Co.)—This
is one of the best and most readable volumes of the excellent " Historic Towns " series, to which it belongs. Each of the members of the once formidable Cinque Ports Federation, which latterly included not only Winchelsea and Rye, not to speak of the original Hastings, Romney, Sandwich, Dover, and Hythe, but the whole of the coast from Birchington to Seaford, has doubt- less had at one time or another its special historian. But never, in all probability, was the story of the Cinque Ports as a whole told in so few pages, with so much enthusiasm, and yet with so much judgment. It is well to be reminded that during the time when, more than at any other perhaps, England was liable to invasion, the Cinque Ports either staved off invasion, or bore the brunt of it themselves. At one time they supplied almost the whole of our fighting Navy. Their decay, or rather their decline into what they now are, is not associated with disgrace, being due to circumstances over which their inhabitants had certainly no control. Professor Burrows, who, by-the-way, has unique qualifica- tions for writing a book of this kind, as he is both a Captain in the Royal Navy and Chichele Professor of Modern History in Oxford, is remarkably successful in his treatment of the special privileges of the Cinque Ports, and in reproducing their civic life.
Previous page
