Sandwich ends at the Barbican, the foreign-looking watergate that spans the road on the hither side of the Stour. Down to the left, away from the road to Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, can be seen from this point the dark ruin of Richborough, and directly on that road, to the right, a belt of sparse woodland, a clump of thin, wiry trees, insufficiently nourished on the sandy and pebbly soil. In midst of this, solitary and surrounded with an atmosphere of melancholy, is an absolutely uninteresting modern house. These trees and this house form all that remains of the once important and flourishing port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an early rival of Sandwich itself. The spot and an adjoining one are now marked on the maps as "Great and Little Stonar." The history of that vanished town is vague and fragmentary, but enthralling, like some half-told tale of faëry. Its very incertitude renders it into the likeness of a city of dream, the product of a magician's wand, blighted by uncanny spell. What, then, do we know of Stonar? Just this: that in the long ago, in A.D. 456, the Britons under Vortimer, after being deserted by the Roman legions, secured one of their few victories over the invading pagan Saxons on this spot, a spot fixed by the Latin annalist in the phrase, "In campo juxta Lapidem Tituli." It was near here, therefore, in these flats, that the battle was fought, and the place seems to derive its name of Stonar from that same Latin "Lapidem." Now it is remarkable that the Kentish coast is rich in place-names including the word "stone." Littlestone near Old Romney, is an example—Folkestone another, and the most prominent—the ancient "Lapis Populi" of Latin records. But from what stones those original names proceeded who shall say?
THE BARBICAN, SANDWICH.
The British victory was but an interlude in an almost unbroken series of defeats inflicted upon that unhappy people by the ruthless Saxons, who presently bore down all opposition on the Kentish shores, and established themselves here. It was they who founded the original town of Stonar, on a sandspit even then forming at the mouth of the River Stour and the entrance to the channel of the Wantsume, dividing the Isle of Thanet from the mainland of Kent; and the Roman fortress of Rutupium, the vast shell of ruined Richborough that we see to-day, overlooking the surrounding marshes from its rising vantage-ground, was converted by them into a fortress-palace for their kings.
SANDWICH, FROM GREAT STONAR.
When, in the course of time, the Saxons had possessed themselves of the country and had at last become luxurious and less warlike, they were in turn attacked by the fiercer Danes. Prominent among the many bloody fights waged for the mastery was the second battle of Stonar, fought here between the forces of Torkill the Dane and the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside, in 1009. It was one of those exceptional victories for the Saxons that now and again cheered them in their long series of disasters.
Stonar's alternative name of Lundenwic seems to have derived from the extensive trade with London, but of the vanished town and its records we know next to nothing. Only this, indeed, that its rivalry with Sandwich was fierce, and that Sandwich was gaining the advantage and Stonar decaying when the ill-fated town was entirely destroyed and swept away by the sea in the great storm of 1365, when Sandwich not only took all its trade, but assumed its alias of "Lundenwic" as well. "It is an ill wind that blows no one any good," says the old saw, and this was worth much to Sandwich. If tempests—or "tompuses," as the Kentish folk, in their quaint speech, call them—were of such destructive powers to-day, insurance would cease to be the lucrative business it now is.
Richborough, that frowns so grim down upon the Stour meadows and the flat Sandwich and Ramsgate road, is a favourite haunt of archæologists. It rises, rugged walls and bulging bastions, from low, earthy cliffs, ivy-clad in places, and shrouded by dense thickets of brushwood, where the earth falls away to the levels. The secretive ivy, incredibly aged, clasps the hoary masonry with a tenacity that will not allow of severance. They will live and die together, those walls and that "rare old plant, the ivy green."