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This day we left the shore of Essex and coasted along Kent, passing by the pleasant island of Thanet, which is an island, and that of Sheppy, which is not an island, and about three o 'clock, the wind being now full in our teeth, we came to an anchor in the Downs, within two miles of Deal.
You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent Sea. In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existing names had been given at all to the towns or villages nay, when the towns and villages themselves were not Ruim was already a noteworthy island.
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.
Most people have talked of late as though the palmy days of England were fairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as I can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet.
But in the year 597, that famous landmark in the Christianizing of Saxon England, Augustine, landed if Bede may be trusted for a topographical detail of this character on the island of Ebbsfleet, where Hengist and Horsa had previously found a haven for their vessels. This is now part of the corner of Kent, called Thanet, and is an island no longer.
But the latter were too busy fighting the Huns to send troops, and in desperation the Britons formed an alliance with Hengist and Horsa, two Saxon travelling men who, in 449 A.D., landed on the island of Thanet, and thus ended the Roman dominion over Britain. The Saxons were at that time a coarse people.
Therefore, the foreigner with the high-sounding name was conveyed by the watches at the squire's bidding to the cottage of the Lamberts over at Acol, the only place in Thanet which he had ever called his home. The old Quakeress, wrathful and sullen, had scarce understood what the whole pother was about.
Thanet is a tract of land at the mouth of the Thames, on the southern side; a sort of promontory extending into the sea, and forming the cape at the south side of the estuary made by the mouth of the river.
But it stretches out to windward in a long line of flat land edged with low cliff, and studded with large farms and engine-houses. It might be a bit of the Isle of Thanet, or of the Lothians, were it not for those umbrella-like Palmistes, a hundred feet high, which stand out everywhere against the sky.
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.
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