Robin Hood’s Bay: the smuggling trade behind the streets

The fishing village behind the smuggling stories

The lower village is so tightly folded around the Dock that it’s easy to underestimate the scale of its connections. Start with the fishing boats.

Fishing long preceded the village’s eighteenth-century smuggling reputation. John Leland, travelling through England in the 1530s, described a fishing settlement with twenty boats. The local history assembled with the Fylingdales Local History Group places his account in 1536. This was a community organised around getting boats and catches between sea and shore, with the skills and working relationships that required.

Calling it isolated can be misleading. It was difficult to approach overland, but the sea connected its inhabitants to a much wider economy. Historian Alan Storm’s study of Robin Hood’s Bay, covering the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, emphasised the importance of shipping, the coastal coal trade and service to the local alum industry alongside fishing. His research also identified dense family networks that helped sustain maritime enterprise.

Why smugglers brought tea into Robin Hood’s Bay

A pound of tea could earn someone a living at either end of the trade. The question was whose duty, if anyone’s, had been paid on it.

The contraband included spirits, tea, tobacco and silk. High import duties made evasion profitable: a seller could undercut the price of legally imported goods while still earning enough to pay the people taking the risks. Customers did not have to be committed rebels to appreciate a cheaper drink.

There was money behind the operation as well as muscle. The National Park’s conservation appraisal describes local yeomen financing ventures and outbuildings being used for storage. A landing was one stage in a business. Cargo had to leave the coast and reach buyers; a stock of tea sitting indefinitely beneath a cottage brought its owners little benefit.

This helps explain the breadth of involvement described in local accounts. Householders could provide concealment, people with animals could transport goods, and those with money could finance a voyage. It does not prove that every resident participated, willingly or otherwise. Nor does it make the whole enterprise a charitable scheme. I can understand the appeal of avoiding an unpopular tax without awarding every investor the role of village benefactor.

The price gap mattered enough for government to attack it directly. William Pitt’s Commutation Act of 1784 sharply reduced the duty on tea with the aim of curbing smuggling. Fifty years later, Robert Peel was still invoking that change in Parliament when discussing the relationship between taxation and illegal imports. A duty cut is less picturesque than a pursuit through an alley, but it could alter the calculation behind the pursuit. Different commodities remained subject to different pressures; the tea measure did not bring all coastal smuggling to an immediate end.

What survives of the smugglers’ passages

The underground evidence deserves attention on its own terms. Historic England’s guidance on maritime archaeology identifies surviving smugglers’ tunnels at Robin Hood’s Bay, while noting that archaeological evidence for smuggling is often fragmentary and difficult to verify. That qualification is useful. A passage can survive after the details of its use have become uncertain.

King’s Beck runs beneath part of the village and emerges at the beach. The National Park’s appraisal describes connections between tunnels below houses and the covered watercourse. Covering a beck also created building space in a settlement where land was scarce. Drainage and concealment could therefore share the same structure; we do not need to imagine that every underground opening was excavated solely for contraband.

Once I knew where King’s Beck went, the silk story made more sense to me. In a village short of level ground, a covered channel could give people space to build and leave a useful way between buildings. The surviving passages tell us something about that ingenuity. The journey of any particular bolt of silk belongs to the stories people told about it.

When the revenue men tried to intervene

I’d put the accounts of the revenue men alongside the good village stories. One gives us an idea of what an interception could cost.

The encounters at sea make it harder to maintain a wholly affectionate view of the smugglers. In his 1912 history King’s Cutters and Smugglers, E. Keble Chatterton drew extensively on manuscript records of the Revenue service. He described Robin Hood’s Bay as a rendezvous from which smuggling vessels challenged and drove off the government’s cruisers.

One regional encounter in his account is particularly revealing. On 7 May 1778, Captain Bland of the Mermaid approached a smuggling vessel off Huntcliff, further north along the Yorkshire coast. It answered his hail with gunfire. When an armed cutter came to its assistance, Bland withdrew. Chatterton also recorded complaints that powerful smugglers protected smaller vessels, making seizures much harder. The organisation extended beyond getting one cargo ashore in the dark.

Outside observers brought their own prejudices. The historian Andrew Gritt cites Lieutenant Francis Gibson’s 1782 description of Robin Hood’s Bay as a place sustained chiefly by fishing and smuggling, while examining the suspicious way respectable commentators often wrote about maritime communities. A government officer’s account and a story told within a fishing family may illuminate different parts of the same event. Neither deserves automatic acceptance.

The story at the Fisherman’s Arms

The former Fisherman’s Arms in the Dock has one of the most satisfying local tales. Revenue officers supposedly seized a consignment of spirits, helped themselves while guarding it, then fell asleep. The smugglers returned and recovered their goods. It has the pleasing economy of a joke: the officers’ reward for success becomes the reason for their failure.

Community archaeologist Hannah Thompson recounts it for the coastal archaeology project CITiZAN as a local belief associated with an autumn night in 1779. That is how I would tell it too. The story belongs to the place, but its neat ending should not be promoted into a documented eyewitness account without further evidence. Other popular versions disagree over the quantities seized, which is another reason to resist decorating it with confident numbers.

I’d keep the story for the walk because it’s a good one to hear in the Dock, right by the building it belongs to. The same village has held on to another name people are tempted to take literally.

The village’s name needs similar care. Its origin is uncertain, and the local history group finds no evidence that the Robin Hood of Sherwood folklore came here. The name makes a splendid setting for stories about defying authority. It cannot establish that the smugglers were following his example, or that their earnings were shared with the poor.

The reading room and the people the sea took

The museum on Fisherhead is worth finding even if you already know the smuggling stories. My favourite detail is that the building itself once housed two very different sides of village life.

The building has its own sequence of public uses. In 1891, the parish vicar, the Reverend R. J. Cooper, acquired it on a long lease and had a coroner’s room and mortuary provided. From 1900 it also served as a reading room, with newspapers and books available to local people; that use continued until 1987. I like the way this small building moves the account from people dying at sea to the people at home who wanted somewhere to read. A village history ought to have room for both.

For a longer visit, I would add Old St Stephen’s Church at Fylingdales, on the hillside above the village. Built in 1821, it retains painted box pews, a gallery and a three-level pulpit. Memorials inside and in the churchyard record people lost at sea, while successful lifeboat rescues are also commemorated. These names and losses give the maritime history a weight that an anonymous smuggler’s barrel cannot carry.