The enormous size of the cornfields of Thanet is immediately apparent, and is one of the most striking features of the Isle. The soil, too, is remarkably fertile; owing, according to the old monkish chronicles, to the Divine favour shown to the locality through the virtues of St. Augustine and his Christian mission. Nothing was too tough for the imaginations of those mediæval monks to assimilate.
Three miles across these vast, hedgeless fields, whose waving, golden corn in August meets the blue zenith with a startling contrast, is Minster—“Minster-in-Thanet,” more particularly to distinguish it from Minster-in-Sheppey. It is reached through Monkton, a little wayside village, where the old stocks still stand by the grassy selvedge of the road, outside the church. Minster forms one of the most popular excursions for the summer tripper at Margate or Ramsgate. I think they do not come precisely for sake of its archæological associations or its religious history, but rather because there are popular tea-gardens in the village and the beer at the several inns is supposed to be of super-excellence.
The founding of the original monastery, at Minster, for nuns, was accompanied, according to the legend, by miraculous interpositions, but these are so common in the story of early religious houses that we are not in the least surprised at them; nor is there any room for astonishment in learning that the Saxon King, who, very greatly against his instincts, gave the land for the monastery, did so give it as expiation for murder.
It all happened about A.D. 670, when marvels were still in the making. It was Egbert, eighth King of Kent, who instigated the crime. He had two cousins whose claims to the throne were better than his, but he secured the succession, and, to make the position doubly sure, consigned the unfortunate cousins to death by the agency of one Thunor, whose very name, meaning “thunder,” has something of a grandly awful quality. Thunor murdered those rightful heirs, and their bodies were buried under Egbert’s throne. It seems a strange choice. But a mysterious heavenly light shone upon the spot and threw the King into abject terror, so that he sent for Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, confessed his share in the crime, and asked what was to be done. On the advice given, he sent for Domneva, sister of the murdered princes, and compounded with her on the terms of giving her, for the purpose of building a monastery, as much land as a hind could run over at one course.
The hind was accordingly released in the presence of the King, and held a straight course over Thanet, running over forty-eight plough-lands, some ten thousand acres, in spite of the attempts made by Thunor to stop it. He had better have let the animal run, without any interference, for, as he attempted to ride across its path, the ground opened in an earthquake and swallowed him “in the infernal regions, in company with Dathan and Abiram,” as the old monkish chronicle has it.
Thunor is described by Simon of Durham as “a certain man of sin and son of perdition, a limb of Satan and of the house of the devil.” I don’t think much more to his discredit could be added; and altogether we may conclude that, if this genealogy be anywise correct, he simply went home to his relations when the earth opened and received him so dramatically.
The line taken by the hind was long known as “St. Mildred’s Lynch,” from St. Mildred, daughter of Domneva, who succeeded her mother as Abbess. It ran, a green bank, across Thanet, between the manor-house at the east end of Minster church and St. Mildred’s Bay, Westgate.
Most of it has been broken down and ploughed under in spite of the monkish legend that the cultivator who destroyed it would meet with the fate of Thunor.
MINSTER-IN-THANET CHURCH.