It all happened about A.D. 670, when marvels were still in the making. It was Egbert, eighth King of Kent, who instigated the crime. He had two cousins whose claims to the throne were better than his, but he secured the succession, and, to make the position doubly sure, consigned the unfortunate cousins to death by the agency of one Thunor, whose very name, meaning “thunder,” has something of a grandly awful quality. Thunor murdered those rightful heirs, and their bodies were buried under Egbert’s throne. It seems a strange choice. But a mysterious heavenly light shone upon the spot and threw the King into abject terror, so that he sent for Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, confessed his share in the crime, and asked what was to be done. On the advice given, he sent for Domneva, sister of the murdered princes, and compounded with her on the terms of giving her, for the purpose of building a monastery, as much land as a hind could run over at one course. The hind was accordingly released in the presence of the King, and held a straight course over Thanet, running over forty-eight plough-lands, some ten thousand acres, in spite of the attempts made by Thunor to stop it. He had better have let the animal run, without any interference, for, as he attempted to ride across its path, the ground opened in an earthquake and swallowed him “in the infernal regions, in company with Dathan and Abiram,” as the old monkish chronicle has it. Thunor is described by Simon of Durham as “a certain man of sin and son of perdition, a limb of Satan and of the house of the devil.” I don’t think much more to his discredit could be added; and altogether we may conclude that, if this genealogy be anywise correct, he simply went home to his relations when the earth opened and received him so dramatically. The line taken by the hind was long known as “St. Mildred’s Lynch,” from St. Mildred, daughter of Domneva, who succeeded her mother as Abbess. It ran, a green bank, across Thanet, between the manor-house at the east end of Minster church and St. Mildred’s Bay, Westgate. Most of it has been broken down and ploughed under in spite of the monkish legend that the cultivator who destroyed it would meet with the fate of Thunor. [Illustration: MINSTER-IN-THANET CHURCH.]