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Under the walls of these powerful strongholds, whose grim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at their feet, ships were safe from piracy, while Ruim itself sheltered them from the heavy sea that now beats with north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact, the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to Rutupiæ as the Solent stands to Portsmouth and Southampton.
The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed the crest of the Hog's Back and the Guildford downs, crossing the various rivers at spots whose very names still attest the ancient passages the Wey at Shalford, the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the Wantsum Strait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear the dim echo to this day of the Roman Vada.
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.
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 through 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.
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.
But as a fishing village it dates back to the middle ages, when the little chapel of "Our Lady of Bradstow" stood in the gap of the cliffs, and was much addressed by anxious sailors rounding the dangerous point after the silting up of the Wantsum. Ships as they passed lowered their top-sails to do it reverence.
Thanet is now all sea-front it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward the sea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the middle ages Minster was the most important place in the whole island; and after it ranked Monkton, St.
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.
The isle is shed away from the continuous land by the stream Wantsum, which is three furlongs broad, and in two places is fordable, and either end lies in the sea. On this isle came up Christ's servant Augustine and his fellows he was one of forty.
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 Rutupiæ, not, as now, towards the tall cliffs and the German Ocean.
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