Origins of Monkton

Where did Monkton come from, and where does its name come from? The answer starts well before the parish church or any of the farms and cottages described elsewhere on this site — with an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, and a gift from a Saxon queen.

Anglo-Saxon Monkton

Monkton’s name is thought to come from “Monks’ town” — in the Domesday Survey of 1086 it appears as Monocstune, a spelling Hasted attributes to the village “being part of the possessions of the monks of the priory of Christ-church, in Canterbury” (Parishes: Monkton, British History Online — more from the same source below). That several-century link to the priory is covered in its own section below, but the site was already settled long before it began.

A large Anglo-Saxon cemetery has been identified at Monkton, on the southern slope of a low chalk ridge about half a kilometre north of the village, close to Walters Hall Farm — the farm named on the 1926 map and listed in Places (grid reference TR 29089 65537). It lies just south of the modern A253, which follows the line of “Dunstrete”, an ancient east–west trackway across Thanet — a position that parallels other Anglo-Saxon cemeteries sited next to a boundary track. Until around the 14th century, Monkton also bordered the Wantsum Channel, the now-silted waterway that once separated Thanet from mainland Kent.

A pipe-trench survey found the cemetery extended around 370 yards (338 m) west–east and 200 yards (183 m) north–south, with burials mainly of the 6th–7th centuries AD. An earlier find nearby on Primrose Hill in 1879 (a skeleton with a knife and several pieces of pottery) suggests the burial ground extends further still.

Sources: Kent Historic Environment Record — Jutish Cemetery, Monkton, Thanet (Kent County Council); for the original excavation report, see the Kent Archaeological Society’s The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Monkton, Thanet (Archaeologia Cantiana, vol. 89).

The manor and the priory

In 961, Queen Ediva — mother of Kings Edmund and Eadred — gave the manor of Monkton to Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, exempting it from secular service other than defence, castle-repair, and highway maintenance. By Domesday it was valued at £20 under Edward the Confessor, rising to £40 under the Normans. It stayed in the priory’s hands until the Dissolution in 1536, when Henry VIII granted it to his newly-founded Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.

Monkton was also, for a time, a market town: Henry VI granted a Saturday market and an annual fair on St Mary Magdalene’s day (22 July), for the sale of hogs — long since lapsed.

Source (this section and the next): Edward Hasted’s The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1800), the standard 18th-century county history, as reproduced by British History Online: Parishes: Monkton.

The church and the vicarage

The church of St Mary Magdalene was appropriated to Christ Church Priory under Henry II, along with its dependent chapels at Birchington and Woodchurch — revoked for a time by Archbishop Baldwin, then restored by Archbishop Islip around 1360. It once had twelve stalls for its resident monks and priests. In 1377, Archbishop Langham formally endowed the vicarage, setting the vicar’s stipend at “twelve pounds and twenty pence” a year plus tithes and oblations.

Conflicting evidence

The list of vicars — recorded on a board that stood in the church porch — dates Monkton becoming a vicarage to 1361, sixteen years before Archbishop Langham’s 1377 endowment as given by Hasted. The two may both be right: a vicarage could well have existed before its stipend was formally fixed. This page hasn’t tried to reconcile them.

Later priors left their own mark: Prior Selling built a new dormitory around 1480, and Prior Goldstone added two barns around 1500.

By 1563 the parish had around 15 households (same source as above: Hasted’s Survey of Kent, via Parishes: Monkton on British History Online). For the church’s architecture rather than its administrative history, see the Short Guide to St Mary Magdalene.

Monkton in the Second World War

Monkton Marshes was the site of one of two decoy “Q” airfields built to protect RAF Manston, three miles to the north-east (the other was at Ash Level, near Sandwich). Built under the Royal Engineers’ Colonel John Turner, these decoys used dummy flare paths, taxiing lights, and obstruction lights — worked through the night by two aircraftmen in a blast-proof control shelter — to draw Luftwaffe bombers into dropping their bombs over open marshland rather than the real airfield. Nearly 150 such “Q” sites were built across southern and eastern England, and between them drew 859.65 tonnes of bombs in 521 attacks meant for their parent stations by the end of the war. Little has been recorded of the Monkton site specifically — the Kent Archaeological Society researchers who explored and photographed Manston’s other decoy, at Ash Level, mention Monkton Marshes only in passing, and its exact location and condition don’t yet appear to have been documented in the same detail.

Monkton’s chalk pits — later reclaimed as the Nature Reserve — also played a small part in Manston’s wartime story after the fact: when the airfield’s main runway was rebuilt and concreted in 1945, chalk dug from the Monkton pits helped fill the undulations beneath it.

Sources: Paul Tritton, “Discovering Kent’s Wartime Airfields That Never Were”, Kent Archaeological Society magazine (New Year 2022); KentOnline, “The tumultuous history of Kent’s most divisive airport”. For the chalk pits’ own later story — quarrying through the 20th century and their 1985 opening as a nature reserve — see Terry Marsh’s Monkton Memories.

Monkton today

The civil parish (which includes the hamlet of Gore Street) sits at the south-west edge of the Isle of Thanet, along the B2047 between Canterbury and Ramsgate, with a recorded population of 661 at the 2011 census. Monkton Primary School was founded in 1872. (Source for this paragraph: Monkton, Kent — Wikipedia.)

The old chalk quarry at Monkton Nature Reserve, reclaimed as a wildlife site, comes up repeatedly in Terry Marsh’s Monkton Memories — not from the Wikipedia source above, but from the site’s own primary material — see, for instance, his piece on the old chalk pits, which describes Willett’s chalk pit becoming the Nature Reserve.

About these sources

The material on this page comes from external published sources (linked inline above), rather than the parish’s own records — unlike most of this site, which draws on the churchyard survey, the parish magazine, and other primary material gathered locally. Corrections and local knowledge are very welcome — see About for how to get in touch.