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I have ventured by this time to speak of Ruim as Thanet; and indeed that was already one of the names by which the island was known to its own inhabitants. The ordinary history books, to be sure, will tell you in their glib way that Thanet is ‘Saxon’ for Ruim; but, when they say so, believe not the fond thing, vainly imagined. The name is every day as old as the Roman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third century, calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British fragment of the Peutinger Tables–that curious old map of the later empire–it is marked as Tenet. Indeed, it is a matter of demonstration that every spot which had a known name in Roman Britain retained that name after the English conquest. Kent itself is a case in point, and every one of its towns bears out the law, from Dover and Lymne to Reculver and Richborough, which last is spelt ‘Ratesburg’ by Leland, Henry the Eighth’s commissioner.

In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Romans, must have shared in the general advance of the country. Solinus says it was ‘glad with corn-fields’–felix frumentariis campis–but this could only have been on the tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yet attempted to scale the flanks of the chalk downs. As lying so near Rutupiae, too, villas must certainly have occupied the soil in places, as we know they did in the Isle of Wight; while the immense number of Roman coins picked up in the island appears to betoken a somewhat dense provincial population.

The advent of the English brings Thanet itself, as distinct from its ancient port, the Wantsum, into the full glare of legendary history. According to tradition, it was at Ebb’s Fleet, a little side creek near Minster, that Hengest and Horsa first disembarked in Britain. As a matter of fact, there is reason to suppose that at a very early time an English colony did really settle down in peace in Thanet. On Osengal Hill, not far from Ebb’s Fleet, the cemetery of these earliest English pioneers in England was laid bare by the building of the South Eastern Railway. The graves are dug very shallow in the chalk, seldom as deep as four feet; and in them lie the remains of the old heathen pirates, buried with their arms and personal ornaments, their amber beads and strings of glass, and the coins that were to pay their way in the other world. But, what is oddest of all, a few of the graves in this earliest English cemetery are Roman in character, and in them the interment is made in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost irresistible that the first settlement of Thanet by the English was a purely friendly one, and that Roman and Jute lived on side by side as neighbours and allies on the Kentish island.

I don’t doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of Kent was equally friendly, and that the population of the county contains throughout an almost balanced mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements.

However, the century and a half that succeeded the English colonization of south-eastern Britain were, no doubt, a time of great retrogression towards barbarism, as everywhere else in Romanised Europe. The villas that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the sea and river began slowly to slit up the central part of the great navigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa, if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famous landing took place in Thanet. Augustine and his companions disembarked at Ebb’s Fleet, and held close by (on the hill behind Prospect House) their first interview with AEthelberht. But though this epoch-making event happened to occur in Thanet, it has no special connection with the history of the island, any further than as a component of England generally. And indeed, even through the garbled version of Bede, it is plain enough to see that British Christendom was not yet wholly wiped out in eastern Britain. The conversion of Kent was essentially a conversion of the king and nobles to the Roman communion; it brought back once more the part of Britain most in connection with the continent into the broad fold of continental Christendom. It is quite clear, in fact, that Rutupiae and Durovernum, Richborough and Canterbury, had never ceased to hold close intercourse with the opposite shore, whose cliffs still shine so distinctly from the hills about Ramsgate. For AEthelberht himself was married to a Christian Frankish princess of the house of the Merwings; and coins of the Frankish kings and of the Byzantine emperors have been found on the surface or in contemporary Jutish graves in Kent.