ions, 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 throug