Two hundred years ago Britain expected Napoleon to invade at any moment. Along every stretch of coast, local boatmen were signed up as a kind of part-time naval home guard: the Sea Fencibles. Burnham had a big company of them.
Who they were
The Sea Fencibles were the idea of a naval captain, Home Popham, in 1798. Rather than taking fishermen and bargemen away to sea, the Navy would train them where they lived, to defend the stretch of coast they knew best.
The men were watermen: fishermen, oyster dredgers, bargemen. They drilled about once a week with pikes and with guns mounted in small boats, and were paid about a shilling for each day they turned out.
The big attraction was a certificate that protected them from the press gang. A Fencible couldn’t be dragged off to serve on a warship, which goes a long way to explaining why so many signed up.
92 men on the Crouch
Sea Fencibles were set up along the Essex coast from May 1798, at 17 places in all. Later Essex histories give 92 men at Burnham, against 26 at Bradwell. We don’t yet know which year that count comes from: numbers went up and down a lot. Brightlingsea’s company grew from about 20 men to over 100 in two years.
The Essex Regiment Museum says a gunboat called the Ostend was based at Burnham. The Navy’s commander on this coast, Lord Keith, wrote that the sandbanks (the Maplin and the Buxey) protected the Burnham, Maldon and Colne rivers, and that each river had a warship.
If the French had come, the Fencibles would have manned the river’s defences: two 24-pounder guns on the bank opposite the mouth of the Roach. Plans were also drawn up to remove or destroy anything an invader could use, and local millers and bakers were listed so the defenders could be fed.
Two guns isn’t much. C. E. Jefferies thought it showed that nobody really expected the French to come up the Crouch.
1808: guardians or poachers?
On 25 January 1808, 35 smacks from Brightlingsea and other Colne ports sailed into the Crouch to strip Sir Henry Mildmay’s oyster beds, which Burnham’s oyster company rented. Warnings did nothing, so the Burnham men cut away the raiders’ dredges. Some of the ringleaders ended up in Chelmsford gaol. Others were caught by a warship and pressed into the Navy.
A report in The Times tells it more grandly: the raiders were opposed by the Sea Fencibles and by magistrates in a boat, and only gave up when the naval sloop Turbulent attacked.
That same year, though, Jefferies records that the Fencibles were themselves taken to court for poaching oysters from the Mildmay beds, apparently using their official drills as cover. One of them, a man named Allen, argued that the beds were common ground, and lost.
So in 1808 Burnham’s Fencibles may have been both defending the oysters and taking them. We don’t yet know whether the “Burnham men” with the knives were Fencibles, or whether the Allen case was about the raiders or about local men. If you know more, we’d love to hear it.
The end of the Fencibles
After Trafalgar in 1805 the invasion threat faded. In February 1810 the Sea Fencibles were stood down across the country. Burnham’s watermen went back to their boats, and the oysters went back to being guarded by watchmen.
Was your ancestor a Fencible?
The Navy kept pay lists for every station, signed by the men themselves. They’re at The National Archives at Kew, in series ADM 28, arranged by district. The Burnham lists should show the names of those 92 men. If your family has been in Burnham a long time, there’s a fair chance one of them is there.
We’re trying to find out more. If you’ve looked at these records, or your family has stories from the time, please tell us in Discuss.