i8 



favourite bivalve, or of its old association with this little 

 town, in spite of the paragraphs which appear in the daily 

 papers annually, about the time that English oysters come 

 into season. 



No account of the Whitstable oyster, and 

 Whitstable. of the hardy fi shermen O f Kent, whose 



lives are spent in cultivating that luxury, would be complete 

 without a slight sketch of the history of this small Kentish 

 town of about 7,000 inhabitants, which lies on the southern 

 side of the estuary of the Thames, eastward of the Isle of 

 Sheppey, that little spot so quaintly remembranced in 

 " Ingoldsby Legends," and near w y here the waters of the 

 Medway and the Swale flow into the North Sea. It is 

 situate at a distance of 59 miles from London by rail, and 

 is within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the diocese of 

 Canterbury, "under the Great Church," the older inhabi- 

 tants still say, and in the Deanery of Westbere. For marine 

 purposes Whitstable is under the jurisdiction of the Port of 

 Faversham, a somewhat obsolete arrangement. 



We have the assurance of Mr. Sibert 

 Origin of Saunders, who probably knows more of the 

 me * history of Whitstable and its special industry 

 than any man living, that the records of the parish are very 

 scanty. In 1876 he gathered together those he was able to 

 discover, and from them compiled a little book which he 

 modestly entitled '" Some Account of the Church of All 

 Saints and Parish of Whitstable." He is probably correct 

 in deriving the word Whitstable from the old Saxon words, 

 witan, meaning an assembly of wise rulers, and staple, a 

 market. It recently, however, occurred to an archaeological 

 visitor to the town to suggest that the French word for 

 oyster, // nitre, combined with the word staple, might be the 



