Database and Mapping

At the heart of this website is a relational database that contains the details of thousands of ships, merchants, and people from Kent (c.1500-c.1640). Three principal sources have been drawn upon for this project.

Port Books (held by The National Archives, Kew)

The Port Books are now found in The National Archive Series E 190 (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/merchant-trade-records-port-books-1565-1799/). They replaced the particulars of accounts, which now form TNA series E 122 (although some documents are catalogued under E 122 after 1565). From Easter 1565, when they were first introduced, until they were gradually phased out in the late eighteenth century, all information related to maritime trading voyages was entered into these blank parchment books, issued biannually to the head ports and the largest ports under their jurisdiction, in sealed tin boxes from London.

The primary reason for the introduction of the Port Books was financial, an attempt by the crown to increase revenues from the customs duties. Whilst London was heavily regulated due to its proximity to the centre of government, the collection of duties outside the capital was often at best lacklustre or at worst corrupt. To counter this problem, the crown appointed three customs officials in each head port (the Customer, Controller, and Searcher), each of whose job was to record the trade of the port and ensure that the others were not taking bribes and under-recording trade. The government also required that detailed information on each ship, shipmaster, tonnage, cargo, merchants using the vessel, and details of the voyage, were to be recorded, effectively ending the haphazard methods of record keeping that had developed in each port.

As a source, the Port Books can be problematic. The fact that the three customs officials in each head port duplicated each other's work means that if one is not careful when using them, it is possible to double, or triple count each voyage within a port. They also, whilst perhaps reducing corruption and customs evasion, did not eliminate it. But used with care, the detailed information they provide on ships, voyages, and the shipboard communities means that they are the best records for studying the activities of the English merchant fleet, particularly for coastal trade, which was systematically recorded for the first time. They are also the first records of English trade in which the use of English predominates.

Ship Surveys

Numerous ship surveys from this period survive, some of which are stored in the National Archives under the State Papers Collections (see, for example, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/c3411817 and https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/state-papers-domestic-1547-1649/). Other surveys used by this project are held by Kent Archives and Local History (https://www.kentarchives.org.uk/).

Ship surveys are often arranged by port. Surveyors visited each port, taking a record of the ships, including their tonnage, as well as their names. Usually, shipmasters and other members of the maritime community are named in these surveys. Therefore, they provide a wealth of information on the number of ships in each port, the total tonnage for those ports, and the names of the people who worked aboard the vessels. They can sometimes provide us with ships and people who are not recorded in the port books.

Musters

Like in every other county in England and Wales in the sixteenth century – and as had been the case since the Middle Ages – Kentish men were regularly mustered by their towns and villages. The purpose of these county musters was to ensure that there were adequate able-bodied men available for local defence in times of crisis, that their equipment was up to standard, and to perform perfunctory drill. These musters do not represent ‘professional’ soldiers, but their returns do allow us to glimpse the manpower and equipment available to the Crown should it be required. As well as these militia musters, there are also a good number of musters of Kent's garrisons, from the great medieval castles like Dover and Rochester, to Henry VIII's Device Forts on the Kentish coast, especially at Deal, Walmer, and Sandown.

This dataset gathers ninety-seven of these county and garrison musters of both a countywide and town-level provenance from c.1500-1640. Though they differ in content and structure, each muster usually contains the name of the mustered man, the captain, and the capacity in which the soldier was serving (as an archer, billman, arquebusier and so forth). Most garrison documents also contain the length of service and rates of pay the men received. At the same time, the county militia return also occasionally lists the names of wealthy persons in the county who were providing weapons for men serving in their stead.

Additionally, there is a series of musters (mainly running from the 1580s to the 1630s) that record members of the maritime community. These were often taken at times of national emergency, such as those taken in 1587 when the threat from the Spanish Armada was looming. The government took such musters to determine how many people it could press into naval service. Those from the seventeenth century often provide us with the ages and occupations (boatswain, master gunner, etc) of those they recorded. Usually, the musters of sailors were linked with ship surveys. As with our other records, these musters have been collected from The National Archives (mainly from the State Papers, but also from the King's Remembrancer: Accounts Various, catalogued in The National Archives under E 101: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/c6548), and also from Kent Archives and Local History.

Suggested Further Reading:

For national customs accounts

N. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System: A Documentary Study of the Institutional and Economic History of the Customs from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1918).

Susan Flavin and Evan. T. Jones eds. Bristol's Trade with Ireland and the Continent: The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts: Bristol: (Bristol, 2009).

For port books

Neville, J. Williams, The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550-1590 (Oxford, 1988).

For ship surveys

C. Lambert and G. P. Baker, ‘An investigation of the size and geographical distribution of the English, Welsh, and Channel Islands Merchant Fleet, 1571-72,’ in J. Davey and R. Blakemore eds, The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).

J. M. Gibson, J. ‘The 1566 Survey of the Kent Coast’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 112 (1993), 341‒53.

C. Lambert and G. P. Baker, ‘The Merchant Fleet and Ship-Board Community of Kent, c.1565-c.1580’, Archaeologia Cantiana, vol. 140, (2019), pp. 89-110

For general reading on Kent and broader maritime history

C. lambert, J. McAleer, G. P. Baker, L. Huggins, ‘Shipping, Trade, and Maritime Communities: Case Studies of Suffolk, Kent, Hampshire and Dorset, c.1565–c.1630’, The Local Historian (May, 2025)

S. Bligh, E. Edwards and S. Sweetinburgh (eds), Maritime Kent Through the Ages: Gateway to the Sea (Woodbridge, 2021)

C. Jowitt, C. Lambert and S. Mentz (eds), The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime