The Rye Inn with connections to an 18th century gang of smugglers

If a hapless tourist walked through its doors three hundreds years ago, however, they might have had a very different experience: 30-40 weather-beaten smugglers, sitting and drinking with their weapons brandished on the table.

Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, The Mermaid Inn served as an inland base for The Hawkhurst Gang, a notoriously brutal band of smugglers, numbering nearly 600 men, which operated throughout the South Coast.

Like most smugglers during the 18th century, The Hawkhurst Gang usually smuggled tea, which was becoming increasingly popular as a symbol of culture, class and British patriotism, but would also smuggle alcohol, coffee and whatever else they could get their hands on.

More than their smuggling routes, The Hawkhurst Gang were most famous for their sometimes brutal methods.

When they suspected a farm worker from Walberton of stealing bags of tea, for example, one member, Jeremiah Curtis, interrogated him, eventually whipping and beating the man to death.

The gang were one of the biggest and most influential on the south coast, with operations all over Kent, Sussex and Dover.

Their reign of terror came to an end in 1747, when the residents of a town in Kent, sick of the gang’s tyranny, formed a militia under a former army corporal. Enraged, the gang’s leaders threatened to burn the town to the ground if the militia wasn’t disbanded, but they were repelled in what became known as The Battle of Goudhurst. In the year’s afterwards, the gangs leading members were rounded up an arrested.

Operating out of The Mermaid Inn from 1735 until the gang was totally dissolved in 1748, The Hakwhurst Gang had an indelible affect on the centuries old-tavern.

Many of it’s 35 rooms are named after members of the gang. One room is named after Richard Kingsmill, the gang’s famously ruthless second in command, another has been dubbed ‘The Hawkhurst Suite” in reference to the gang’s long lasting presence.

Plenty of the inn’s famous ghosts seem related to the gang, too. According to Judith Blincow, who has owned and run The Mermaid Inn since 1993, guests have reported waking up in the middle of the night to see two figures engaged in a duel to the death, with the loser being thrown down the stairs of a secret passage.

Thanks to Judith Blincow and The Mermaid Inn for their help with this article, to find out more about them, visit mermaidinn.com