Tuesday, 9 July 2019

A little of Thanet's History

Every so often in the bookshop where I work the question why the Isle of Thanet comes up, what people are getting at here is why is this part of England called an Island when it obviously isn't.
The oldest map of Thanet was drawn in around 1400 for Thomas Elmham's Historia Monasterii S Augustini Cantuariensis 
click here to read it
sorry about the latin the victorian edition and so on.

 On the whole I think most people agree that Thanet was an island in 1400.
this navigational chart for 1590 shows the Wantsum Channel between Thanet and the rest of Kent silted up.

 Back in Roman times I think Thanet was definitely an Island and probably still one in 1400
About 10 years ago I had a crack at a rough map of it as an island
Mostly based on this 1830 map with shaded levels, missed Stonar Spit, but there you go.

This is the title vignette from Lewis which was probably drawn in the early 1700s to depict an earlier Thanet.

A problem with history is that the more you know the more you realise how much you don't know. Anyway I am working up to revising my understanding of the early history of Thanet.

A busy day at work in the bookshop

Link to the books we put out for sale


finally this fragment that came up during my reserch This man in behalfe of himselfe and his Covent appealed * to the then Comissary of Cant. for Justice against a certaine foule mouthed abusive fellow, who (as he stands charged upon record) anno 1452. had called them Whoresons and farting Monks. He lyeth buried in the Lady-Chapell, but the brasse is almost all torne from his monument. Iohn Stone a most pious Monk of the place was contemporary with this Prior
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1 comment:

  1. SimonApril 27, 2025 5:15 pm

    Hi Michael

    I have been researching location names for some years and Thanet was originally from the Saxon 'Thane aeg' meaning Thane's island where a Thane is a servant, probably originating from Henghest and Horsa's first settlement given to them by King Vortigern, as they were servants.

    Over the years people added Island after the original meaning of the name was lost. The Isle of Oxney is another location with an added island after the original oxen aeg (Oxen Island) meaning was lost.

    I have added a link to this blog from https://saxonhistory.co.uk/FORMS-Page-Builder.php?Pg=Sea_Level_Rises my page explaining how i perceive the sea level changing through the centuries.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.

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