Whitstable, were as much in repute with Roman epicures as their
descendants are to-day with the young Luculluses of the Gaiety and the
Criterion.

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