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 les