238 THE ISLE OF RU1M. 



Prankish princess of the house of the Merwings ; and 

 coins of the Frankish kings and of the Byzantine 

 emperors have been found on the surface or in contem- 

 porary Jutish graves in Kent. 



It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks 

 whom Gregory chose to accompany Augustine on his 

 easy mission, one was Lawrence, who succeeded his 

 leader as second Archbishop of Canterbury, and another 

 was Peter, the first Abbot of St. Augustine's monastery. 

 Out of compliment to these pioneer missionaries, or to 

 their Eoman house of St. Andrew's, almost every old 

 church in that part of Kent is dedicated accord- 

 ingly, either to St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Peter, 

 St. Gregory, St. Andrew, or St. Martin (patron of 

 Bertha's first church at Canterbury). Thus, as we shall 

 see hereafter, St. Lawrence was the mother church of 

 Ramsgate, and St. Peter's of Broadstairs, while the 

 entire lathe bears the name of St. Augustine. 



In Thanet, too, the first evidence of the new order of 

 things was the foundation in the island of that great 

 civilizing agency of mediaeval England, a monastery. The 

 site chosen for its home was still, however, characteristic 

 of the old point of view of Thanet. 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 Rutupiae, not, as now, 

 towards the tall cliffs and the German Ocean. Ecgberht, 

 fourth Christian king of Kent, by the advice of Theodore, 

 the monk of Tarsus who became Archbishop of Canter- 



