THE ISLE OF RUIM. 243 



Church at Canterbury (the cathedral monastery), as did 

 also St. Nicholas at Wade, remarkable for its large and 

 handsome Early English church. All these ecclesiastical 

 lands were excellently tilled. After the Eeformation, 

 however, things changed greatly. The silting up of the 

 Wantsum and the decay of Sandwich Haven left Thanet 

 quite out of the world, remote from all the main high- 

 roads of the new England. Ships now went past the 

 North Foreland to London, and knew it only as a 

 dangerous point, not without a sinister reputation for 

 wrecking. On the other hand, on the land side, the 

 island lay off the great highways, surrounded by marsh 

 or half-reclaimed levels ; and it seems rapidly to have 

 sunk into a state resembling that of the more distant 

 parts of Cornwall. The inhabitants degenerated into 

 good wreckers and bad tillers. They say an Orkney man 

 is a farmer who owns a boat, while a Shetlanderis a 

 fisherman who owns a farm. In much the same spirit, 

 Camden speaks of the Elizabethan Thanet folks as ' a 

 sort of amphibious creatures, equally skilled in holding 

 helm and plough ' ; while Lewis, early in the last century, 

 tells us they made ' two voyages a year to the North 

 Seas, and came home soon enough for the men to go to 

 the wheat season.' With genial tolerance the Georgian 

 historian adds, ' It's a thousand pities they are so apt to 

 pilfer stranded ships.' Piracy, which ran in the Thanet 

 blood, seemed to their good easy local annalist a regret- 

 table peccadillo. 



In all this, however, we begin to catch the first faintly- 

 resounding note of modern Thanet. The intelligent 

 reader will no doubt have observed, with his usual acute- 



B 2 



