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At such a time Sandwich, with its shallow fiord, was sure to afford good shelter to the northern long ships; and isolated Thanet, overlooking the navigable strait, was a predestined depot for the northern pirates, as four centuries earlier it had been for the followers of those mythical personifications, Hengest and Horsa. Long before the unification of England under a single West Saxon overlordship the Danes used to land in the island every year, to plunder the crops, and in 851, when AEthelwulf was lord of Wessex at Winchester, ‘heathen men,’ says the Winchester Chronicle, with its usual charming conciseness, ‘first sat over winter in Tenet.’ From that time forward the ‘heathen men’ continually returned to the island, which they used apparently as a base of operations, with their ships lying in Sandwich Haven; in fact, Thanet must long have been a sort of irregular Danish colony. Still, St. Mildred’s nuns appear to have lived on somehow at Minster through the dark time, for in 988 the Danes landed and burnt the abbey, as they did again under Swegen in 1011, killing at the same time the abbess and all the inmates. On the whole, it is probable that life and property in Thanet were far from secure any time in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries.

At least as late as the Norman conquest the Wantsum remained a navigable channel, and the usual route to London by sea was in at Sandwich and out at Northmouth. It was thus that King Harold’s fleet sailed on its plundering expedition round the coast of Kent (a small unexplained incident of the early English type, only to be understood by the analogies of later Scotch history), and thus too, that many other expeditions are described in the concise style of our unsophisticated early historians. But from the eleventh century onward we hear little of the Wantsum as a navigable channel; it has dwindled down almost entirely to Sandwich Haven, ‘the most famous of English ports,’ says the writer of the life of Emma of Normandy, about 1050. Sandwich is indeed the oldest of the Cinque Ports, succeeding in this matter to the honours of Rutupiae, and all through the middle ages it remained the great harbour for continental traffic. Edward III. sailed thence for France or Flanders, and as late as 1446 it is still spoken of by a foreign ambassador as the resort of ships from all quarters of Europe.

Still, the Wantsum was all this while gradually silting up, a grain at a time, and the Isle of Ruim was slowly becoming joined to the opposite mainland. When Leland visited it, in Henry VIII.’s reign, the change was almost complete. ‘At Northmouth,’ says the royal commissioner, in his quaint dry way, ‘where the estery of the se was, the salt water swelleth yet up at a Creeke a myle or more toward a place called Sarre, which was the commune fery when Thanet was fulle iled.’ Sandwich Haven itself began to be difficult of access about 1500 (Henry VII. being king), and in 1558 (under Mary) a Flemish engineer, ‘a cunning and expert man in waterworks,’ was engaged to remedy the blocking of the channel. By a century later it was quite closed, and the Isle of Thanet had ceased to exist, except in name, the Stour now flowing seaward by a long bend through Minster Level, while hardly a relic of the Wantsum could be traced in the artificial ditches that intersect the flat and banked-up surface of the St. Nicholas marshes.

Meanwhile, Thanet had been growing once more into an agricultural country. Minster, untenable by its nuns, had been made over after the Danish invasions to the monks of St. Augustine at Canterbury, and it was they who built the great barn and manor house which were the outer symbol of its new agricultural importance. Monkton, close by, belonged to the rival house of Christ Church at Canterbury (the cathedral monastery), as did also St. Nicholas at Wade, remarkable for its large and handsome Early English church. All these ecclesiastical lands were excellently tilled. After the Reformation, however, things changed greatly. The silting up of the Wantsum and the decay of Sandwich Haven left Thanet quite out of the world, remote from all the main highroads of the new England. Ships now went past the North Foreland to London, and knew it only as a dangerous point, not without a sinister reputation for wrecking. On the other hand, on the land side, the island lay off the great highways, surrounded by marsh or half-reclaimed levels; and it seems rapidly to have sunk into a state resembling that of the more distant parts of Cornwall. The inhabitants degenerated into good wreckers and bad tillers. They say an Orkney man is a farmer who owns a boat, while a Shetlander is a fisherman who owns a farm. In much the same spirit, Camden speaks of the Elizabethan Thanet folks as ‘a sort of amphibious creatures, equally skilled in holding helm and plough’; while Lewis, early in the last century, tells us they made ‘two voyages a year to the North Seas, and came home soon enough for the men to go to the wheat season.’ With genial tolerance the Georgian historian adds, ‘It’s a thousand pities they are so apt to pilfer stranded ships.’ Piracy, which ran in the Thanet blood, seemed to their good easy local annalist a regrettable peccadillo.