Stonar is a quondam town and a parish in Thanet district, Kent.  The town stood on the river Stour, 1 mile north-north-east of Sandwich;  is supposed to have been the Lapis Titnli of the Romans;  was the place of Louis the Dauphin's debarkation in 1216, and of Edward III.'s embarkation in 1359;  was destroyed by the French in 1385;  figured as a member of Sandwich in 1773;  and is now represented by only a farm house.  Post town, Sandwich.  Real property, £1,546.  The living is a rectory in the diocese of Canterbury.  Value, not reported.  Patron, the Crown, by lapse.  There is no church.¹

Stonar was written anciently Eastanore and Eastanores, meaning perhaps the Eastern Ore, in contradistinction to the other place of the same name near Faversham, still called Ore, both which belonged formerly to the Monastery of St. Augustine at Canterbury.  After the water had retired from Ebbsfleet, Stonar became the common place of debarkation in the Isle of Thanet;  and during the three centuries immediately succeeding the Conquest, it was a considerable place.  Dr. Harris quotes a manuscript of Dr. Plot, dated about 1693, which says, that "the ruins of Stonar, till within the memory of man, took up many acres of ground, but were lately removed to render the ground fit for tillage." its prosperity however, we may presume, was checked by the growth of the opposite haven of Sandwich, and by the alteration in the course of the Wantsume.  In the 39th year of the reign of Edward III. a sad disaster befel the town in "a terrible inundation of the sea," which overwhelmed a great part of it:  and in the year 1385, it was entirely destroyed by the French, who, after having pillaged it, burnt it to the ground.

Camden and Dr. Plot are of opinion that the Portus Rutupensis was at Stonar, which at that time stood in the same situation with respect to the city of Rutupiae, that Leith does now to Edinburgh.

Besides the piratial attack of the French mentioned above, this port was on two preceding occasions the landing place of an invading enemy;  in the year 1009, of Turkill, the Dane;  and in the last year of King John's reign, of Lewis, the Dauphin, who brought with him a numerous army.

South Stonar House, in the ancient Parish of Stonar, the residence of J. Wood, Esq., is situated at the southern point of the Isle of Thanet, distant from Sandwich not quite half a mile north.⁴

The civil parish of the same name at the 1921 census was coextensive with the ecclesiastical parish.³

¹John Marius Wilson, comp.  The Imperial Gazatteer of England and Wales. (London, England: A. Fullerton & Co., 1870).

²Edward Hasted, ed. and comp.  The town and parish of Stonar: Town and manors, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 4 (1798), pp. 260-307.

³William Page, 1861-1934, ed.  The Victoria County History of Kent, vol. 3, p. 360.(London, England: The St. Catherine Press, Stamford Street, Waterloo, S.E., 1932).

⁴C. Greenwood, comp.  Epitome of County History, vol. 1, County of Kent. (London, England: privately printed, 1838).

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