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It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks whom Gregory chose to accompany Augustine on his easy mission, one was Lawrence, who succeeded his leader as second Archbishop of Canterbury, and another was Peter, the first Abbot of St. Augustine’s monastery. Out of compliment to these pioneer missionaries, or to their Roman house of St. Andrew’s, almost every old church in that part of Kent is dedicated accordingly, either to St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Peter, St. Gregory, St. Andrew, or St. Martin (patron of Bertha’s first church at Canterbury). Thus, as we shall see hereafter, St. Lawrence was the mother church of Ramsgate, and St. Peter’s of Broadstairs, while the entire lathe bears the name of St. Augustine.

In Thanet, too, the first evidence of the new order of things was the foundation in the island of that great civilizing agency of mediaeval England, a monastery. The site chosen for its home was still, however, characteristic of the old point of view of Thanet. It was the place that yet bears the name of Minster, situated on a little creek of the Wantsum sea, where some slight remains of an ancient pier may even now be traced among the silt of the marshes. The island still looked towards the narrow seas and the port of Rutupiae, not, as now, towards the tall cliffs and the German Ocean. Ecgberht, fourth Christian king of Kent, by the advice of Theodore, the monk of Tarsus who became Archbishop of Canterbury, made over to the lady whose name is conveniently Latinised as Dompneva, first abbess, some forty-eight plough-lands in the Isle of Thanet. This cultivated district, bounded by the ancient earthwork known (from the name of the second abbess) as St. Mildred’s Lynch, lay almost entirely within the westward-sloping and mainly tertiary lands; the higher chalk country was as yet apparently considered unfit for tillage. The existing remains of Minster Abbey are, of course, of comparatively late Plantagenet date; but as parts of a great grange, whose still larger granary was burnt down only in the last century, they serve well to show the importance of the monastic system as a civilizing agency in the country districts of England.

Already in Bede’s time the Wantsum was beginning to get silted up, mainly by the muddy deposits brought down by the Stour. It was then only three furlongs wide, and could be forded at two points, near Sarr and at Wade. The seaward mouth was also beginning to be encumbered with sand, and the first indication we get of this important impending change is the fact that we now hear less of Richborough, and more of Sandwich, the new port a little nearer the sea, whose very name of the Wick or haven on the Sand, in itself sufficiently tells the history of its origin. As the older port got progressively silted up, the newer one grew into ever greater importance, exactly as Norwich ousted Caister, or as Portsmouth has taken the place of Porchester. Nevertheless, the central channel still remained navigable for the vessels of that age–they can only have drawn a very few feet of water–and this made the Wantsum in time the great highway for the Danish pirates on their way to London, and exposed Thanet exceptionally to their relentless incursions.

In fact, the Danes and Northmen were just what they loved to call themselves, vik-ings or wickings, men of the viks, wicks, bays, or estuaries. What they loved was a fiord, a strait, a peninsula, an island. Everywhere round the coast of Britain they seized and fortified the projecting headlands. But in the neighbourhood of the Thames, the high road to the great commercial port of London, the mementoes of their presence are particularly frequent. The whole nomenclature of the lower Thames navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish ‘wall’–that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork–ran across the isthmus to defend the Scandinavian peninsula from its English enemies.