In another part of this volume mention has already been made of Frank
Stokoe, who, after being "out" in the '15 with Lord Derwentwater, died
in great poverty. His family never again rose to anything like
affluence, nor even to a status much above that of the ordinary
labouring classes, but his descendants were always big, powerful men,
perhaps slow of brain, but ready with their hands, and there was at
least one of them who was afterwards well known in Northumberland. This
was Jack Stokoe, a noted and very daring smuggler.
Jack lived in a curious kind of a den of a house far up one of the wild
glens that are to be found in that moorland country which lies between
the North and the South Tyne. It could scarcely be claimed that he was a
farmer--indeed, in those days there was nothing to farm away up among
those desolate hills--and therefore Stokoe made no attempt to pose as
anything in the bucolic line; it was a pretty open secret that his real
occupation was neither more nor less than smuggling. But he had never
yet been caught while engaged in running a contraband cargo, and,
whatever reason there may have been for suspicion, no revenue officer
had ever had courage to make a raid on his house. There came, however,
to that district a new officer, one plagued with an abnormally strong
sense of duty, a "new broom," in fact, an altogether too energetic
enthusiast who could by no means let well alone, but must ever be poking
into other people's affairs in a way that began at length to create
extreme annoyance in the minds of those honest gentlemen, the smugglers.
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