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.
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 depôt 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 Æthelwulf 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 Rutupiæ, 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.
In all this, however, we begin to catch the first faintly-resounding
note of modern Thanet. The intelligent reader will no doubt have
observed, with his usual acuteness, that up to date we have heard
practically nothing of Ramsgate, Margate, and Broadstairs, which now
form the real centres of population in the nominal island. Its
relations have all been with Rutupiæ, Sandwich, Canterbury, and the
mainland. But the silting up of the Wantsum turned the new Thanet
seaward, by the chalky cliffs; and the gaps or gates in that natural
sea-wall now began to be of comparative importance as fishing stations
and small havens. Ebb's Fleet was no longer the port of Ruim. The
centre of gravity of the island shifts at this point, accordingly, from
Minster to Ramsgate. The change is well marked by certain interesting
ecclesiastical facts. Neither Ramsgate nor Broadstairs had originally
churches of their own. The first formed part of the parish of St.
Lawrence, which was itself a mere chapelry of Minster till late in the
thirteenth century. The old village lies half a mile inland, and
Ramsgate itself was throughout the middle ages nothing more than a mere
gap and cove where the fishermen of St. Lawrence kept their boats. The
first church in the town proper was not erected till 1791. Similarly,
Broadstairs formed part of the parish of St. Peter's, the village of
which lies back at about the same distance from the sea as St.
Lawrence; and St Peter's, too, was at first a chapelry of Minster. The
cliffs were then nothing; the inward slope was everything.
Margate seems to have been the first place in the new Thanet to attain
the honour of a place in history. As in two previous cases, the Mere
Gate was at first but a fisherman's station for the village of St.
John's, which gathered about the old church at the south end of the
existing town. But as the Northmouth closed up, and Sandwich Haven
decayed, the Mere Gate naturally became the little local port for corn
grown on the island and wool raised on the newly-reclaimed Minster
Level. A wooden pier existed at Margate long before the reign of Henry
VIII., when Leland found it "sore decayed," and the village was in
repute for fishery and coasting trade. Throughout the Stuart period
Margate was the ordinary place of departure and arrival for Flushing
and the Low Countries. William of Orange frequently sailed hence, and
Maryborough used it for almost all his expeditions. It was about the
middle of the last century, however, that the real prosperity of
Margate first began. Then it was that citizens of credit and renown in
London first hit upon the glorious discovery of the seaside, and that
watering-places tentatively and timidly raised their unobtrusive heads
along the nearer beaches. The journey from London could be made far
more easily by river than that to Brighton by coach; and so Margate,
the nearest spot to town (by water) on the real sea with any
accommodation for visitors, became in point of fact the earliest London
seaside resort. It was, if not the first place, at least one of the
first places in England to offer to its guests the perilous joy of
bathing machines, which were inaugurated here about 1790.
With the introduction of steamers Margate's fortune was made. Floods of
Cockneydom were let loose upon the nascent lodging-houses. Then came
the London, Chatham and Dover, and South Eastern Railways, and with
them an ever-increasing inundation of good-humoured cheap-trippers. The
Hall-by-the-Sea and other modern improvements and attractions followed.
Like the rest of Thanet, Margate has now become a mere suburb of
London, and what it resembles at the present day a delicate regard for
the feelings of the inhabitants forbids me to enlarge upon. I will
merely add that the recognized modern name of Margate is an
etymological blunder, due to the idea immortalized in the borough
motto, "Porta maris, Portus salutis," that it means Door of the Sea.
The true word is still universally preserved on the lips of the local
fisher-folk, who always religiously call it either Meregate or Mergate.
Ramsgate, a much more attractive and enjoyable centre, rich in
excursions to points of genuine interest, dates somewhat later. It
first came into note about the beginning of the eighteenth century,
when it did a modest trade with the Levant and the Black Sea, or, as
contemporary English more prettily phrases it, 'with Russia and the
east country.' In 1750 the first pier was built, as a national work,
mainly to serve as a harbour of refuge for ships caught in gales off
the Downs. The engineer was Smeaton, and he succeeded in creating an
artificial harbour of great extent, which has lasted substantially up
to the present time. This new port, rendered safer by the enlargement
in 1788, made Ramsgate at once into an important seafaring town, the
capital of the Kentish herring trade, alive with smacks in the busy
season. The steamers did it less good at first than they did to
Margate; but the completion of the two railways, and the building of
the handsome extensions on the east and west cliffs, turned it at once
into a frequented watering-place. It is the fashion nowadays rather to
laugh at Ramsgate. Marine painters know better. Few harbours are
livelier with red and brown sails; few coasts more enjoyable than the
cliff walk looking across towards the Goodwins, the low shore by
Sandwich, the higher ground about Deal and Dover, and the dim white
line of Cape Blancnez in the distance.
Broadstairs, close by the lighthouse on the North Foreland (the Cantium
Promontorium of Roman geography), is still newer as a place of public
resort. But as a fishing village it dates back to the middle ages, when
the little chapel of "Our Lady of Bradstow" stood in the gap of the
cliffs, and was much addressed by anxious sailors rounding the
dangerous point after the silting up of the Wantsum. Ships as they
passed lowered their top-sails to do it reverence. Under Henry VIII. a
small wooden pier was thrown out to protect the fishing boats; and
about the same time, as part of the general scheme of coast defence
inaugurated by the king, a gate and portcullis were erected to close
the gap seaward, in case of invasion. The archway and portcullis groove
remain to this day, with an inscription recording their repair in 1795
by Sir John Henniker. The railway has turned Broadstairs into a minor
rival of Ramsgate and Margate and 'a favourite resort for gentry,'
where 'those who require quietness, either from ill health or a
retiring disposition,' says a local guide-book, may enjoy 'the united
advantages of tranquillity and seclusion.' Hundreds of retiring souls
indeed may be observed on the beach any day during the season, seeking
tranquillity in a game of cards, repairing their health with the
stimulus of donkey exercise, or soothing their souls in secret hour
with music sweet as love, discoursed to them by gentlemen in loose pink
suits and artificially imitated Æthiopian countenances.
Westgate is the very latest-born of these Thanet gates, a brand-new
watering-place, where every house proclaims the futility of the popular
belief that Queen Anne is dead, and where fashionable physicians send
fashionable patients to cure imaginary diseases by a dose of fresh air.
It has no history, for only a few years since it consisted entirely of
a coastguard station and three or four cottages: but it is interesting
as casting light on the nature of the revolution which has turned
Thanet inside out and hind part before, making the open sea take the
place of the Kentish mainland, and the railway to London that of the
silted Wantsum.
At the present day Thanet as a whole consists of two parts: the live
sea front, which is one long succession of suburban watering-places;
and the agricultural interior, including the reclaimed estuary, which
ranks among the best-farmed and most productive districts in all
England, Yet till a very recent date the Thanet farmers still retained
the use of the old Kentish plough, the coulter of which is reversed at
the end of every furrow; and many other curious insular customs mark
off the agriculture of the island even now from that which prevails
over the rest of the country.
I don't know whether I'm wrong, but it often seems to me the very best
way to gain an idea of the real history of England is thus to take a
single district piecemeal, and trace out for one's self the main
features of its gradual evolution. By so doing we get away from mere
dynastic or political considerations, leave behind the bang of drums or
the blare of trumpets, and reach down to the living facts of common
human activity themselves--the realities of the workaday world of
toilers and spinners. By narrowing our field of view, in fact, we gain
a clearer picture on our smaller focus. We see how the big historical
revolutions actually affected the life of the people; and we trace more
readily the true nature of deep-reaching changes when we follow them
out in detail over a particular area.
A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.
'Why, what did they want to build a city right up here for, anyway?'
the pretty American asked, who had come with us to Fiesole, as we
rested, panting, after our long steep climb, on the cathedral platform.
Now the question was a pertinent and in its way a truly philosophical
one. Fiesole crests the ridge of a Tuscan hill, and in America they
don't build cities on hill-tops. You may search through the length and
breadth of the United States, from Maine to California, and I venture
to bet a modest dollar you won't find a single town perched anywhere in
a position at all resembling that of many a glowing Etrurian fastness,
that 'Like an eagle's nest Hangs on the crest Of purple Apennine.'
Towns in America stand all on the level: most of them are built by
harbours of sea or inland lake; or by navigable rivers; or at the
junction of railways; or at a point where cataracts (sadly debased)
supply ample water-power for saw-mills and factories; or else in the
immediate neighbourhood of coal, iron, oil wells, or gold and silver
mines. In short, the position of American towns bears always an
immediate and obvious reference to the wants and necessities of our
modern industrial and commercial system. They are towns that have grown
up in a state of profound peace, and that imply advanced means of
communication, with a free interchange of agricultural and manufactured
products.
Hence in America it is always quite easy to see at a glance the _raison
d'être_ of every town or village one comes across. New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore--New Orleans, Montreal, San Francisco,
Charleston--are all great ports for the exportation of corn, pork,
'lumber,' cotton, or tobacco, and the importation of European
manufactured goods. Chicago is the main collecting and distributing
centre for the wide basin of the upper Great Lakes, as Cincinnati is
for the Ohio Valley, and St. Louis for the Mississippi and Missouri
confluents. Pittsburg bases itself upon its coal and its iron; Buffalo
exists as the point of transfer where elevators raise the corn of
Chicago from lake-going vessels into the long, low barges of the Erie
Canal. In every case, in that newest of worlds, one can see for oneself
at a glance exactly why so large a body of human beings has collected
just at that precise spot, and at no other.
But when you have toiled up, hot and breathless, through olive and
pine, from the Viale at Florence to the antique Cyclopean walls of
Etruscan Fæsulæ, you wonder to yourself, like our American friend, as
you pant on the terrace of the Romanesque cathedral, what on earth they
could ever have wanted to build a town up there for, anyway.
If we look away from Tuscany to our own England, however, we shall find
on many a deserted down or lonely tor ample evidence of the causes
which led the people of this ancient Etruscan town to build their
citadel at so great a height above the neighbouring valley. Fiesole,
says Dante, in a well-known verse, was the mother of Florence. Even so
in England, Old Sarum was indeed the mother of Salisbury, and Caer
Badon or Sulis was the mother of Bath. And when there was first a
Fæsulæ on the hill here there could be no Florence, as when first there
was an Old Sarum on the Wiltshire downs there could be no Salisbury,
and when first there was a Caer Badon on the heights of Avon there
could be no Bath.
In very early times indeed, in the European land area, when men began
first to gather together into towns or villages, two necessities
determined their choice of a place to dwell in: first, food-supply
(including water); and second, defence. Hence every early community
stands, to start with, near its own cultivable territory, usually a
broad river-valley, an alluvial plain, a 'carse' or lowland, for
uplands as yet were incapable of tillage by the primitive agriculture
of those early epochs. But it does not stand actually _in_ the carse;
it occupies as a rule the nearest convenient height or hill-top, most
often the one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by way
of security against the attack of enemies. This is the beginning of
almost every great historical European town; it is an arx or acropolis
overhanging its own tilth or _ager_; and though in many cases the town
came down at last into the valley, retaining still its old name, yet
the remains of the old earthworks or walls on the hill-top above often
bear witness to our own day to the original site of the antique
settlement upon the high places.
One can mark, too, various stages in this gradual process of secular
descent from the wind-swept hills into the valleys below, as freer
communications and greater security made access to water, roads, and
rivers of greater importance than mere defence or elevated position. At
Bath, for example, it was the Pax Romana that brought down the town
from the stockaded height of Caer Badon, and the Hill of Solisbury to
the ford and the hot springs in the valley of the Avon. At Old Sarum,
on the other hand, the hill-top town remained much longer: it lived
from the Celtic first into the Roman and then into the West Saxon
world; it had a cathedral of its own in Norman times; and even long
after Bishop Roger Poore founded the New Sarum, which we now call
Salisbury, at the point where the great west road passed the river
below, the hill-top town continued to be inhabited, and, as everybody
knows, when all its population had finally dwindled away, retained some
vestige of its ancient importance by returning a member of its own for
a single farmhouse to the unreformed Parliament till '32. As for
Fiesole, though Florence has long since superseded it as the capital of
the Arno Valley, the town itself still lives on to our own time in a
dead-alive way, and, like Norman. Old Sarum, retains even now its
beautiful old cathedral, its Palazzo Pretorio, and its acknowledged
claims to ancient boroughship. In England, I know by personal
experience only one such hill-top town of the antique sort still
surviving, and that is Shaftsbury; but I am told that Launceston, with
its strong castle overlooking the Tamar, is even a finer example. This
relatively early disappearance of the hill-top fortress from our own
midst is in part due, no doubt, to the early growth of the industrial
spirit in England, and our long-continued freedom from domestic
warfare. But all over Southern Europe, as everybody must have noticed,
the hill-top town, perched, like Eza, on the very summit of a pointed
pinnacle, still remains everywhere in evidence as a common object of
the country in our own day.