h 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 Rutupiae, Sandwich, Canterbury, and the
mainland. But the silting up of the Wa