s 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 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 operat