Snargate

Snargate, on the Romney level, amounts to a church, an inn and three farms, and the seat of the levels' own court for longer than the county has kept minutes. The levels are reclaimed sea, held dry for some eight hundred years by a wall the landholders have kept up without anyone telling them to. Their court was granted by no charter and seats no Crown officer: the landholders elect their officers, levy a rate reckoned on each foot of frontage, and can enter any man's land, order any work and seize goods for unpaid rate. Only once has the county tried to place it under a commission, and the attempt was dropped when the levels simply went on electing and paying their own men.

In a storm week the muster gathers at Snargate. Wall-Reeve Osbert Appledore has held the office eleven years and has four times called a hundred men up onto the wall in one night; on the last of those occasions the water rose to nine inches below the top, and since then nobody has questioned his authority. The line the lookers care most about is Rhee Wall, two miles of the old inner bank which is all that holds the sea off the level once the outer face gives way.

Bands are hired here in the storm weeks for hard, poorly paid work, and a company that does it well gains a standing on the level no ordinary commission can buy. Settle beforehand where you will stay if the road floods, and stay there.