Stonar was situated on an island at the mouths of the Stour and Wantsum. Some archæologists who are not satisfied with the generally received legend of Ebbsfleet believe it was here Augustine landed. The converted King Canute made a grant of it to St. Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury, and in the deeds accompanying the gift we find it named “Estonores.” The name should properly, no doubt, be spelled Stonor: the stone on the edge, or shore. Its alias, “Lundenwic,” derived from its position on the then navigable channel of the Wantsum, on the short-cut round to the Thames and London by Reculver; “wic,” like the “wich” of Sandwich, being the Norse vik, for bay or channel.
Sandwich was at last overtaking Stonar in the race for prosperity, and Stonar was already decaying when a great storm in 1365 overwhelmed the sandy island on which it was situated. This disaster had been to some extent retrieved when a French expedition landed in 1385 and burnt what had been rebuilt. Fate was too strong for that unfortunate port, and it then sank into utter oblivion. Antiquaries claim to have discovered the site of its church, but of buildings not the slightest traces remain above ground, and the sea that once destroyed it long ago rendered the site useless by retreating over a mile away.
Such is the history of Stonar, and almost to the same complexion have the vagaries of sea and sands brought its once successful rival, Sandwich.
The town of Sandwich is so comparatively little known that when its name arises it is first of sandwiches—ham or other—or of the Sandwich Islands, that one thinks; the ancient town taking the remote place of tertium quid and coming last. Yet, indirectly, Sandwich gave a name both to the eatables and the islands, by the intermediary of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, that bright particular star among the rabbit-warren of ennobled Montagues in the eighteenth century who was known familiarly as “Jemmy Twitcher,” and was great at the Admiralty, and greater perhaps as a gambler. In his honour Captain Cook named Hawaii and its archipelago the “Sandwich Islands”; and the gamester’s intentness upon the hazards of play and disinclination from breaking off for meals led him to keep hunger off at the card-table by eating meat between slices of bread; called, after him, “sandwiches.”
The ancient town and reverend Cinque Port of Sandwich is entered by a bridge across the Stour and thence by passing under the arch of the old Barbican, a curious outwork of the times when walls and gates were necessary for the town’s security. The only other remaining gate is the Fishergate, along the same quay, built in 1578. The road from Ramsgate and the bridge across the Stour to the Barbican are comparatively modern innovations, the only entrance from this side being formerly by ferry to Fishergate. The bridge was first built in 1755, and is in part an iron swing-bridge, permitting the passage of small vessels to the upper quays. Against its parapets lean the idle, the born tired, and the infirm of Sandwich the livelong day; some staring into the water, or vaguely across the sandy flats; others facing north, expending a fascinated stare upon the activities of the brewery, which is the busiest thing in the town. There are more imposing entrances than this to English towns; the bold gates and frowning towers of Canterbury and of York bring back mediævalism, a living thing; but no other approach is so truly quaint as that to Sandwich by the Barbican. Little, squatty round towers with their lower half chequered black and white in flint and stone, and their upper part finished with peaked roofs like witches’ hats, give an effect almost unreal in their completely picturesque setting, with the curious tower of St. Peter’s peering over the roof-tops. It is so rarely complete that you almost suspect it to be the lath-and-plaster and painted canvas building of the entrance, let us say, to a “Cinque Port Exhibition.” But it is undeniably real, unquestionably genuine, and is but the introduction to much else of an old-world character that Sandwich contains.
Sandwich is a little town. For all its ancient importance—the Liverpool of olden times—it was never large, and the ancient, grassy ramparts that almost encircle it were at no time a hindrance to expansion. Mediæval Canterbury, in common with another walled city and town, threw out suburbs, which may be seen to this day outside the walls, looking almost the age of the original place; but Sandwich, however crowded it may have grown within the walls, had never any suburbs. A seaport at once so wealthy and prosperous, and so exposed to raids from over-sea as was this in the olden days of fire and sword, could not afford to give such hostages to fortune as unprotected suburbs would be. The history of Sandwich, a tale of repeated burnings and pillagings, sufficiently shows that even behind its defences it could not withstand the many furious attacks made from time to time. Apart from the many such disasters of early times, of which history speaks but vaguely, we hear of the town being laid waste in 1046 by vikings; of damage done in 1052 by the rebel Earl Godwin, and of constant forays in mediæval times, including the burning by the French in 1216. It again suffered severely at the hands of the French in 1400, 1438, and 1457; and in 1470, in an attack by the rebel Earl of Warwick; and only when the power and prosperity of the port had decayed did the town know peace. “He who is low need fear no foe,” truly says the jingling proverb.
To-day the size and shape of the town are what they always were. The ramparts still look out upon the open, level meadows, and not only are there no suburban developments, but there is even room within the ancient ceinture for expansion. It is a strange fall from ancient eminence.
We hear nothing of Sandwich before A.D. 665, when Wilfrid, Bishop of Northumbria, is recorded to have landed in the haven that then had apparently begun to make the fortune of the place. He came ashore “happily and pleasantly.” Richborough was already dead as a port, and the twin ports of Stonar and Sandwich were thriving upon its decay. Very rare and fragmentary are these early notices of Sandwich, and it is not until A.D. 851 that we again hear of it, in a severe defeat of invading Danes, administered by Athelstan. That date marks the beginning of an era of troubles caused by those fierce piratical Northerners, ending for a time only in 1016, when the Danes under Canute made themselves masters of the country. In all that century and a half the viking ships, with the dreaded device of the Black Raven, became, as we are told by a recent writer, “a familiar but always unwelcome sight.” Unwelcome! Yes, indeed. A thought too mild, perhaps, that word; because we know those Danish pirates to have been so peculiarly unwelcome that when they were caught, their captors expressed their hatred by skinning them alive and nailing their hides upon the church-doors. Such treatment left no room for doubt.
In the defensive measures early undertaken against these marauding hosts some historians trace the first inception of that famous alliance of seashore towns known as the “Cinque Ports,” among which, although Dover has always been accounted chief, Sandwich certainly makes the better figure in olden story. Of all those seaports in that brotherhood whose privilege it was to bear the proud and strange dimidiated arms of the half-lions and half-boats, Sandwich suffered more severely at the hands of the foreigner, it was more honoured, it rose to loftier heights of prosperity, made greater sacrifices, and in the end its decay was the more marked. It will be convenient here to concisely tell the story of those ports.
The Cinque Ports, as a confederacy, arose from an early necessity for guarding the south coast against the sea-rovers and other piratical hordes out of the north of Europe, who began to harry these shores so early as the time of the Romans. In the later years of the Roman occupation of Britain, when the grip of that masterful people was growing enfeebled with luxurious habits, and when not even the twin great fortresses of Regulbium and Rutupiæ sufficed to overawe those fierce strangers, it had been found necessary to provide especially for the defence of these ports, and to appoint a commander whose particular charge the great stretch of coast from Yarmouth, down past the Thames and Medway, and so on to the Kentish and Sussex coasts, should be. This official was the Comes littoris Saxonici, that is to say, the “Count of the Saxon Shore.”