THE ISLE OF RUIAL 235 



rendezvous of the fleets of those British * usurpers ' 

 Maximus and Carausius. It was also the Dover of its 

 own day, the favourite landing place for continental 

 travellers ; while its famous oysters, the true natives, 

 now driven by the silting up of their ancient beds to 

 ^Yhitstable, were as much in repute with Eoman 

 epicures as their descendants are to-day with the young 

 Luculluses of the Gaiety and the Criterion. 



I have ventured by this time to speak of Euim 

 as Thanet ; and indeed that was already one of the 

 names by which the island was known to its own 

 inhabitants. The ordinary history books, to be sure, 

 will tell you in their glib way that Thanet is ' Saxon ' 

 for Euim ; but, when they say so, believe not the fond 

 thing, vainly imagined. The name is every day as old 

 as the Eoman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third 

 century, calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British frag- 

 ment of the Peutinger Tables that curious old map of 

 the later empire it is marked as Tenet. Indeed, it is a 

 matter of demonstration that every spot which had a 

 known name in Eoman Britain retained that name after 

 the English conquest. Kent itself is a case in point, 

 and every one of its to^vns bears out the law, from Dover 

 and Lymne to Eeculver and Eichborough, which last is 

 spelt ' Eatesburg ' by Leland, Henry the Eighth's 

 commissioner. 



In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Eomans, 

 must have shared in the general advance of the country. 

 Solinus says it was ' glad with corn-fields 'Jelix 

 frumentariis campis but this could only have been on the 

 tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yet 



