The oldest map of Ramsgate was produced at the beginning of the 1700s. We were very lucky here in Thanet to have a clergyman who was also a historian, most histories of Kent date from around 1800 so we had a jump of about 100 years on most of the rest of the county.
If you want to look at his book,The History and Antiquities as well Ecclesiastical as Civil of the Isle of Tenet, in Kent, we do a cheap reprint here at Michael's bookshop in Ramsgate, so you can come and have a thorough browse of it.
John Lewis, vicar of Margate and Minster was basically a decent and scholarly person. This was not necessarily the case with vicars during the 16 and 1700s.
If you have a decent grasp of latin you could have a browse of Archbishop Wake's private notebook (Notitia Dioces Cantuar,) in Canterbury Cathedral Library.
He said: Patten of Whitstable kept a mistress and did not pay his debts; Bourn of Ash was "allied to the sons of Eli" ; Roberts of Queenborough, ale-house sot and debtor, "so impudent as nothing is like him"; Bate of Chilham, "proudest and stiffest man" in the diocese, allowing corpses to lie unburied for want of fees; Burroughs of Kingston, "most horribly covetous" ; Ansell of Stowting and Cade of Sellindge, Jacobites and taven-brawlers; Edward Dering of Charing who fought his own sister at the Swan Inn and threw her "head-cloaths" into the fire; Hobbs of Dover, who amassed pluralities; Isles of New Romney a notorious sot and Jacobite; Nicholls of Fordwich who preached that George was a Foreigner, a Lutheran, and a Beggar-"a wicked, swearing. Lying, Drunken man".
Notes
For those of you unfamiliar with the sons of Eli may I refer you to 1 Samuel 12- 17.
Pluralities, extra parishes acquired for their incomes alone.
Ecclesia desolata. Church ruined and deserted but still having an income.
The picture which I think is supposed to look like Ramsgate in the 1500s was painted by Kennett Beacham Martin in 1821, so based on his imagination.
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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.