With the publication of our new book about Thanet seamarks –
a review post for this soon, I am reading it at the moment – my memory was
jogged about the possible existence of Minster Lighthouse.
This is very 1066 and all that type of thingy, Britain was a
Saxon country invaded by the Normans back then, the Norman king produced the
Doomsday Book to regulate taxation and this is the first written record of most
places in England.
There is a convent, nunnery, wosisname at Minister in
Thanet, with some very old buildings, the history of this is long and a bit
complicated and it starts not long after St Augustine landed here in 597 AD
bringing Christianity to the UK.
Back in around 650 AD the royal family had a bit more of a
hands on approach to the ruling business and some of the children of the King
of Mercia (Near Wales) got murdered as a result of political intrigue at the
court of King Egbert the king of Kent. The surviving children came to claim
blood money from the king, however one of them Ermenburga asked the king for
land to build a nunnery instead. Being England’s first Christian king Egbert
agreed with this and said she could have as much of The Isle of Thanet as her
tame dear could run around in a day. Thanet was still a proper island back then
and I think she wound up owning about half of it.
Anyway she got some nuns together including her children and
set up her convent at Minster. This got raided by the Vikings in throughout the
last half of the 700s and eventually closed after the Vikings killed about 70
nuns.
Later in 1027 King Canute gave the site to the monks at St
Augustine’s in Canterbury and the monks built a grange (agricultural
administrative centre) there, as a base to run the land (10,000 acres)
from.
After the Norman Conquest 1066 the Normans were concerned
that the island Thanet could provide a base for an enemy to attack the country
from and so they used a scorched earth policy here and everything was laid
waste for a while. Dom Goscelin writing in 1097 writes that the chapel of SS
Peter and Paul was left neglected and desolate’ roofless and the floor covered
in mud.
Back at this time Minster was on the coast of The Isle of
Thanet facing the Wantsum Channel which would have been over a mile wide then.
Once the threat of invasion declined, probably around 1100
the monks came back, rebuilt and carried on until the dissolution of the
monasteries in 1538.
Eventually in 1937 the remaining site 10 acres was bought as
a refuge for a community of Bavarian nuns, threatened with expulsion by the
Nazi regime.
A couple of years ago I went to the convent to sketch it, I
am a fairly slow thinker and find that sketching the subject of interest helps
me to clarify the situation, particularly where history is involved.
When you consider that much of my interest here concerns
local events of over 1000 years ago here is a bit from our reprint of Lewis’s
history of Thanet, http://michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/the_history_and_antiquities_as_well_ecclesiastical_as_civil_of_the_isle_of_tenet.htm
it’s worth considering that Lewis was writing less than 300 years ago.
The photos of the pages should expand enough to read if you
click on them a bit.
So, To the Lighthouse – while I was there sketching I was
told by one of the nuns that the bit on the right of the picture is the oldest
inhabited building in England and the bit on the left the remains of a
lighthouse.
This photo is probably easier to follow than my sketch.
So yesterday I put Minster Abbey Lighthouse, into Google and
got to this page http://www.minsterabbeynuns.org/History/view/28
which says:- 1027 Site granted by King Canute to St Augustine's Abbey,
Canterbury Construction of West (Saxon) Wing, Church and Lighthouse (west
tower).
Easier to explain with splodges on the photo the bit on the
left is the remains of a tower the arch circled in red looks Norman to me, the
bit on the right the bits circled in blue look as though they could be Saxon
windows. The mullioned ones look much later.
I can’t find any sources for the notion that the tower could
have been anything more than the tower of the church attached to the grange and
later demolished.
So does anyone know where the source of it having been a lighthouse is?
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