THE ISLE OF RUIM. 241 



.ZEthelwulf was lord of "Wessex at Winchester, 'heathen 

 men,' says the Winchester Chronicle, with its usual 

 charming conciseness, ' first sat over winter in Tenet.' 

 From that time forward the ' heathen men ' continually 

 returned to the island, which they used apparently as a 

 base of operations, with their ships lying in Sandwich 

 Haven ; in fact, Thanet must long have been a sort of 

 irregular Danish colony. Still, St. Mildred's nuns 

 appear to have lived on somehow at Minster through the 

 dark time, for in 988 the Danes landed and burnt the 

 abbey, as they did again under Swegen in 1011, killing 

 at the same time the abbess and all the inmates. On the 

 whole, it is probable that life and property in Thanet 

 were far from secure any time in the ninth, tenth, and 

 early eleventh centuries. 



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 North- 

 rnouth. It was thus that King Harold's fleet sailed on 

 its plundering expedition round the coast of Kent (a 

 small unexplained incident of the early English type, only 

 to be understood by the analogies of later Scotch history), 

 and thus too, that many other expeditions are described 

 in the concise style of our unsophisticated early 

 historians. 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. Sandwich is 

 indeed the oldest of the Cinque Ports, succeeding in this 

 matter to the honours of Eutupiae, and all through the 



