The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-05
AN OLD SMUGGLING VILLAGE.

Little Pedlington Once the Center of Illegal Traffic.
 Little Pedlington is one of the hun dreds of places in England the aspect of which provokes the stranger to ask, How does it exist?" says The London Globe" There is no life, much less stir, in it from years end to years end; one may traverse it's surrounding hills and i fields for hours without meeting a hu- man being; it's few resident gentry are not of that new school of country set tiers which is doing more than anything else to keep the fire of English country life hickering; the road through it leads rom nowhere to nowhere in particular; it has no staple industry; three out of four of it's inhabitants would not take work if it was offered them, and the fourth would be mighty particular in his choice of what he took.
 But it was not ever thus Until we'll into the nineteenth century Little Ped lington was the busy center of very large and lucratiye-welI, we were go- ing to say trade, but as trade implies legality, we had better call it occupa- tfon, for, if Little Pedlington held one thing more than another in abomination, 1t was that responsibility which is con- ferred by loyal adherence to the laws of the land. Briefly, Little Padlington was the local metropolis of smuggling. Its position, scattered about the wood lands clothing a line of hills which at the time of Caesars invasion were sea washed cliffs, and overlooking an eX- pense of dreary, trackless marsh land, favored it. Boats landed their tubs on the marsh edge, strings or horses car ried them along the devious marsh ways to the foot of the hills, up through the woods by deep sunk tracks still known as the 'keg ways to Little Pedlington, and thence. to the markets of the coun- try as opportunity offered Once in the Petdlington woodland and they were as safe and remote as anywhere in the world. The inhabitants of our neigh borhood, to-day not remarkable for eff fusion and responsiveness, then formed practically a. nation by themselves, using their own dialect and cant, never marrying out of the world of the marsh, observing their own manners and cus- toms, not merely distrustful of stran- gers but absolutely hostile to them, and speaking of places not twenty miles off as being lover in England, 1t was roaring business they carried on in every sense of the word-lucrative, but only to men possessing qualifications not rfar removed from the heroic, and withal saturated with the charm which ever appeals to certain natures with ir- resistible force.-the charm of illegality. It was a desperate occupation, and, ac- eordngly, as it's rewards were great, so were it's punishments heavy Very short ,shrift was meted to the smuggler, justice to him was rarely tempered with mercy, judges were largely ruled by the code of Lydford law, and the result was that the constant process of retaliation gradually trans formed a community of simple eyaders of the law, robbers, if you like, into a gang of desperate ruff fans who stuck at no crime, and who finally brought about their own extinc- tion by the urlWarrantable violence of their behavior. Elsewhere smuggling. Edied a natural death; hereabouts it was crushed because it developed into actu- al brigandage. @e' -. k Only the memories remain of Little Pedlington's golden age, but they are many and strong. for the smugglers of the neighborhood were renowned above all others, There was plenty of sharp work up at the Carter Bar, in Northum- berland and along the Berwick coast;