Science in Arcady

by Grant Allen

Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call it by that strange and now almost forgotten old-world name. There is reason, we know, in the roasting of eggs, and, if I have gone out of my way to introduce the ancient isle to you by its title of Ruim, it is in order that we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, the artificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name of Thanet brings up most prominently at the present day before the travelled mind of the modern Londoner. I want to carry you back to a time when Ramsgate was still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, and Margate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that tumbled seaward over the undesecrated sands; when a broad arm of the sea still cut off Westgate from the Reculver cliffs, and when the tide swept unopposed four times a day over the submerged sands of Minster Level. You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent Sea.

In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existing names had been given at all to the towns or villages—nay, when the towns and villages themselves were not—Ruim was already a noteworthy island. For there is now very little doubt indeed that Thanet is the Ictis or 'Channel Island' to which Cornish tin was conveyed across Britain for shipment to the continent. The great harbour of Britain was then the Wantsum Sea, known afterwards as the Rutupine Port, and later still as Sandwich Haven. To that port came Gaulish and Phoenician vessels, or possibly even at times some belated Phocæan galley from Massilia. But the trade in tin was one of immense antiquity, long antedating these almost modern commercial nations: for tin is a necessary component of bronze, and the bronze age of Europe was entirely dependent for its supply of that all-important metal upon the Cornish mines. From a very early date, therefore, we may be sure that ingots of tin were exported by this route to the continent, and then transported overland by the Rhone valley to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed the crest of the Hog's Back and the Guildford downs, crossing the various rivers at spots whose very names still attest the ancient passages—the Wey at Shalford, the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the Wantsum Strait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear the dim echo to this day of the Roman Vada. Ruim itself, as less liable to attack than an inland place, formed the depôt for the tin trade, and the ingots were no doubt shipped near the site of Richborough. We may regard it, in fact, as a sort of prehistoric Hong-Kong or Zanzibar, a trading island, where merchants might traffic at ease with the shy and suspicious islanders.

Ruim at that time must have consisted almost entirely of open down, sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum, and extending a little farther out to sea than at the present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a wide sea-mouth; Sandwich flats did not yet exist; and the Stour itself fell into the Wantsum Strait at the place which still bears the historic name of Stourmouth. Round the outer coast only a few houseless gaps marked the spots where 'long lines of cliff, breaking, had left a chasm'—the gaps that afterwards bore the familiar names of Ramsgate, that is to say Ruim's Gate, or 'the Door of Thanet;' Margate, that is to say, Mere Gate, the gap of the mere (Kentish for a brook), Broadstairs, Kingsgate, Newgate, and Westgate. The present condition of Dumpton Gap (minus the telegraph) will give some idea of what these Gates looked like in their earliest days; only, instead of seeing the cultivated down, we must imagine it wildly clad with primæval undergrowth of yew and juniper, like the beautiful tangled district near Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now all sea-front—it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward the sea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the middle ages Minster was the most important place in the whole island; and after it ranked Monkton, St. Nicholas, and Birchington—villages, all of them, on the flat western slope. The growth in importance of the seaward escarpment dates only from the days when Thanet became practically a London suburb.

With the Roman invasion Ruim saw a new epoch begin. A great organization took hold of Britain. Roads were made and colonies established. Verulam and Camulodun gave place in part as centres of life and trade to York and London. Even in the native days, I believe, the Thames must always have been a great commercial focus, and the Pool by Tower Hill must always have been what Bede called it many centuries later, 'a mart of many nations.' But under the Romans London grew into a considerable city; and as the regular sea highway to the Thames lay through the Wantsum, in the rear of Thanet, that strip of estuary became of immense importance. In those days of coasting navigation, indeed, the habit was to avoid headlands, and take advantage everywhere of shallow short cuts. Ships from the continent, therefore, avoided the North Foreland by running through the Wantsum at the back of Thanet; as they avoided Shellness and Warden Point by running through the Swale, at the back of Sheppey.

To protect this main navigable channel, accordingly, the Romans built the two great guardian fortresses of the coast, Rutupiæ, or Richborough, at the southern entrance, and Regulbium, or Reculver, at the northern exit. Under the walls of these powerful strongholds, whose grim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at their feet, ships were safe from piracy, while Ruim itself sheltered them from the heavy sea that now beats with north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact, the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to Rutupiæ as the Solent stands to Portsmouth and Southampton. But Thanet Isle hardly shared at all in this increased civilisation; on the contrary, Rutupiæ (the precursor of Sandwich Haven) seems to have diverted all its early commerce. For Rutupiæ became clearly the naval capital of our island, the seat of that vir spectabilis, the Count of Saxon Shore, and the 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 Whitstable, were as much in repute with Roman 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 Ruim 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 Ruim; but, when they say so, believe not the fond thing, vainly imagined. The name is every day as old as the Roman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third century, calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British fragment 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 Roman Britain retained that name after the English conquest. Kent itself is a case in point, and every one of its towns bears out the law, from Dover and Lymne to Reculver and Richborough, which last is spelt 'Ratesburg' by Leland, Henry the Eighth's commissioner.

In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Romans, must have shared in the general advance of the country. Solinus says it was 'glad with corn-fields'—felix frumentariis campis—but this could only have been on the tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yet attempted to scale the flanks of the chalk downs. As lying so near Rutupiæ, too, villas must certainly have occupied the soil in places, as we know they did in the Isle of Wight; while the immense number of Roman coins picked up in the island appears to betoken a somewhat dense provincial population.

The advent of the English brings Thanet itself, as distinct from its ancient port, the Wantsum, into the full glare of legendary history. According to tradition, it was at Ebb's Fleet, a little side creek near Minster, that Hengest and Horsa first disembarked in Britain. As a matter of fact, there is reason to suppose that at a very early time an English colony did really settle down in peace in Thanet. On Osengal Hill, not far from Ebb's Fleet, the cemetery of these earliest English pioneers in England was laid bare by the building of the South Eastern Railway. The graves are dug very shallow in the chalk, seldom as deep as four feet; and in them lie the remains of the old heathen pirates, buried with their arms and personal ornaments, their amber beads and strings of glass, and the coins that were to pay their way in the other world. But, what is oddest of all, a few of the graves in this earliest English cemetery are Roman in character, and in them the interment is made in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost irresistible that the first settlement of Thanet by the English was a purely friendly one, and that Roman and Jute lived on side by side as neighbours and allies on the Kentish island.

I don't doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of Kent was equally friendly, and that the population of the county contains throughout an almost balanced mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements.