The British victory was but an interlude in an almost unbroken series of defeats inflicted upon that unhappy people by the ruthless Saxons, who presently bore down all opposition on the Kentish shores, and established themselves here. It was they who founded the original town of Stonar, on a sandspit even then forming at the mouth of the River Stour and the entrance to the channel of the Wantsume, dividing the Isle of Thanet from the mainland of Kent; and the Roman fortress of Rutupium, the vast shell of ruined Richborough that we see to-day, overlooking the surrounding marshes from its rising vantage-ground, was converted by them into a fortress-palace for their kings. [Illustration: SANDWICH, FROM GREAT STONAR.] When, in the course of time, the Saxons had possessed themselves of the country and had at last become luxurious and less warlike, they were in turn attacked by the fiercer Danes. Prominent among the many bloody fights waged for the mastery was the second battle of Stonar, fought here between the forces of Torkill the Dane and the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside, in 1009. It was one of those exceptional victories for the Saxons that now and again cheered them in their long series of disasters. Stonar's alternative name of Lundenwic seems to have derived from the extensive trade with London, but of the vanished town and its records we know next to nothing. Only this, indeed, that its rivalry with Sandwich was fierce, and that Sandwich was gaining the advantage and Stonar decaying when the ill-fated town was entirely destroyed and swept away by the sea in the great storm of 1365, when Sandwich not only took all its trade, but assumed its alias of "Lundenwic" as well. "It is an ill wind that blows no one any good," says the old saw, and this was worth much to Sandwich. If tempests--or "tompuses," as the Kentish folk, in their quaint speech, call them--were of such destructive powers to-day, insurance would cease to be the lucrative business it now is. Richborough, that frowns so grim down upon the Stour meadows and the flat Sandwich and Ramsgate road, is a favourite haunt of archæologists. It rises, rugged walls and bulging bastions, from low, earthy cliffs, ivy-clad in places, and shrouded by dense thickets of brushwood, where the earth falls away to the levels. The secretive ivy, incredibly aged, clasps the hoary masonry with a tenacity that will not allow of severance. They will live and die together, those walls and that "rare old plant, the ivy green."