Hastings ever was the premier port of the Cinque Ports Confederacy it
is difficult to say. There were, as the name suggests, five
towns--Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, Romney, and Hythe; and in addition
there were Winchelsea and Rye, which differed merely in name, being
called the Antient Towns. If Hastings were ever the most successful of
these, it soon yielded pride of place to its neighbour and rival,
Winchelsea. The sovereigns, especially the Angevins, gradually
transferred their attentions to the more easterly rivals, proffering no
royal aid even when Hastings suffered badly. Slowly, therefore, but
certainly, the town sank to an insignificant position, with just here
and there a tiny patch of more glorious life; and it revived again only
as a result of one of the vagaries of fashion.

It was about 1750 that it took on its second lease of life, soon after
the time when Brighton emerged from the obscurity of a small
fishing-village to form the fashionable watering-place. Society
doctors about that time discovered and began to recommend the
advantages of sea-bathing; and, the vogue spreading, Hastings began
rapidly to extend. When the Duke of Wellington brought his wife hither
in 1806 there were less than four thousand inhabitants; but little by
little the cosy valley, where the old town had so long nestled, ceased
to be big enough, so that the town overflowed its confines; and
eventually the modern resort commenced to flourish, west of the Castle
hill--like a garish fungoid growth at the end of some fallen monarch of
the forest. It was this modern development that excited the bitterness
of Charles Lamb when he wrote his well-known tirade: "I love town or
country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither.... There is no
sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an
heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of
the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it
was in its primitive state, and what it ought to have remained, a fair,
honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something--with a few
straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and
with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could
abide to dwell with Meshech, to assort with fisher-swains, and
smugglers.... But it is the visitants from town, that come here to say
that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a
pond-perch or a dace mig