It is generally thought that today we have no ‘capital punishment crimes’ in Britain, but we do: the sentence is mandatory for the offence of piracy when murder is attempted. This is subject to the mercy of the royal prerogative. North Lincolnshire and its coast in the Humber estuary has seen plenty of this, and it is doubtful that much mercy has ever been shown to the villains involved.
In 2003, a piece in the Nostalgia supplement of the Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph gave an account of the Humber keel, the John William, and mentioned that in recent years it had been in the way when customs and excise had to unload a massive load of contraband cigarettes. Somehow, this modern anecdote fits into a long history of smuggling just north of Scunthorpe on the Humber shores.
Since about AD 500 there have been Viking boats raiding the shores, and there must have been hundreds of ‘foul deeds’ in those early Dark Age years not far from Scunthorpe and Burton. Over the centuries, the villages along from Burton to Barton have been involved in the traffic of political and insurgent factions, and there have even been pirates along that waterway.
In the early seventeenth century a pamphlet was published, giving an account of a particularly effective pirating fleet from the Middle East, and it is clear that this ‘Sally fleet’ as it is known, was part of a well-established network of villains around the Humber and the marshlands of Hatfield. In fact, at one time the expedition against these slave-gathering vessels was led by William Rainbarrowe, whose son had been brutally killed in Doncaster in 1648.
Edward Peacock, the local Victorian antiquary, relates that there were also pirate ships sailing this way from Dunkirk, and that these became known as ‘Dunkirkes’. He also makes it clear that for centuries, the east Coast of Yorkshire and the Humber were open to attack in this way. Much of this history is as yet unresearched, but there is one story, from the Tudor period, that shows what these activities were like. Unbelievably, at that time, no less a person than the Abbot of Whitby was involved in dealing with these privateers and thieves from abroad. The Star Chamber investigation into his business uncovered the fact that he, John Hexham, was in league with a gang of disreputable characters, and that they all bought a ship in their enterprise. Piracy thus had a ‘reputable’ fence and name in the criminal transactions across the East Riding and North Lincolnshire.
The story of their robberies is a fitting one to begin this narrative of crime in the Scunthorpe area, as some of the articles this gang stole were then called ‘osmands’ and, as Edward Peacock tells us, these were ‘the very best used for the finest purposes, such as arrow-heads, fish-hooks…. And the works of clocks.’
Smuggling in the area has a long history, too. When there was an embargo on the export of wool, for instance, in 1274, a group of Louth men sold sacks of wool to Flemish traders and (using bribes) got them to a port and away from home. There was a notably large-scale operation in this trade in 1785, when at Goxhill no less than ninety tons were put aboard ship to go to France. All that can be said about the piracy and smuggling of gangs through the centuries is that most of their stories are still untold, and the tales that were uncovered illustrate the extent of the trade: the fact that a man could be murdered in Doncaster because of a family link to one side of a faction tells us a great deal about the vendettas that could emerge from these nefarious dealings.