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Archaeologia Cantiana -  Vol. 55 - 1942  page 40

Stonar and the Wantsum Channel. Part III — The Site of the Town of Stonar. 
     By The late F. W. Hardman, LL.D., F.S.A., and W. P. D. Stebbing, F.S.A.

about 120 tenants or heirs of tenants, among whom are seven women, a priest, clerks, a skinner, a cobbler, and millers. They paid in rent 44s. 5d. (John the miller of Stonar paid 5s. twice a year for his mill. The Black Book, 23.)
   In 1359 Edward III lodged in Stonar from October 11th to 28th in the house which Robert Goverils had lately possessed, waiting to embark at Sandwich for foreign parts (Boys' Sandwich, 669). In the same year there was a great inundation; and this was followed in 1365-6 by what is recorded to have been a more destructive one (Boys, 669). In 1373 (Murray, op. cit. 56) Stonar refused to pay the subsidy assessed on it as it had been decided in 1368 that their town lay in Kent without the Cinque Port liberty, but in 1384 the church was included in the Deanery of Sandwich. The next year the French with eighteen ships descended on the town and having first laid it waste destroyed it with fire. The Abbot of St. Augustine's at the time was at his manor of Northbourne and, as Thorne tells us,1 would have saved it [Stonar] had he been able to find free passage from his manor to Sandwich. "The Abbot being thus foiled by the French ships" which, as Davis notes, must have occupied the Wantsum Channel far up from Sandwich, "wishing with God's help to keep safe his own property and that of his tenants [and] making a detour by Fordwich and Sturry, succeeded with great toil in reaching the island" of Thanet. The whole story is a dramatic account of the treachery of Simon Burley,

Constable of Dover Castle, and of attempts of the French to get a footing in Thanet. Philipott's observation on this destructive raid is that Stonar "ever since hath found a sepulchre in its own rubbish."2
   In the Index to the Cinque Ports White Book, edited by H. B. Walker, 1905, 53, is the entry under the date 1520, Robt Broke of Sandwich to have 40/- of Mr Worms "for hurts received at Stonar."
   The New Black Book of Sandwich, which records matters from 1608-42, contains a petition to the Lord Warden for leave to take stones from Stonar to mend its (Stonar's) highways. Sir Henry Crispe as owner refused to give leave. The Lord Warden "refers ye matter and agrees that stone may be taken till ye Title can be tryed by Law." In 1650, two years after Sir Henry's death, there was an order for this work to be done as the inhabitants of the Isle of Thanet needed to pass that way to the Haven, and that "there be a footway and posts or beacons about ye horseway to direct the passengers when the water shall overflow the ways ........ and that grippes or open places be made to pass away the water that it annoy not the marshes."
   Sir Henry stood very much on his rights in any claims of Sandwich over Stonar. In an early epitome of the Black Book "a Ryot at
   Wm. Thorne's Chronicle of St. Augustine's Abbey, ed. and trans. by A. H. Davis, 1934, p. 651.
    Villare Cantianum, 1659, p. 390.

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