coloured stones or glass, a claw beaker and pottery. Antiquarians such as the 18th-century clergyman John Duncombe believed that King Æthelberht of Kent moved his royal court there from Canterbury in about 597, and built a palace on the site of the Roman ruins. However, archaeological excavation has shown no evidence of this; Æthelberht's household would have been peripatetic, and the story has been described as probably a "pious legend". A church was built on the site of the Roman fort in about 669, when King Ecgberht of Kent granted land for the foundation of a monastery, which was dedicated to St Mary. The monastery developed as the centre of a "large estate, a manor and a parish", and, by the early 9th century, it had become "extremely wealthy", but it then fell under the control of the archbishops of Canterbury. In 811 Archbishop Wulfred is recorded as having deprived the monastery of some of its land, and soon after it featured in a "monumental showdown" between Wulfred and King Coenwulf of Mercia over the control of monasteries. In 838 control of all monasteries under Canterbury's authority was passed to the kings of Wessex, by the agreement of Archbishop Ceolnoth in exchange for protection from Viking attacks. By the 10th century the monastery at Reculver and its estate were both royal property: they were given back to the archbishops of Canterbury in 949 by King Eadred of England, at which time the estate included Hoath and Herne, and land at Chilmington, about to the south-west, and in the west of the Isle of Thanet. By 1066 the monastery had become a parish church. However, in 1086 Reculver was named in Domesday Book as a hundred, and the manor was valued at £42.7s. (£42.35). Included in the Domesday account for the manor, as well as the church, farmland, a mill, salt pans and a fishery, are 90 villeins and 25 bordars: these numbers can be multiplied four or five times to account for dependents, as they only represent "adult male heads of households". At that time, although Domesday Book records that Reculver belonged to the archbishop of Canterbury in both 1066 and 1086, in reality it must again have been lost to him, since William the Conqueror is recorded as having returned it, among other churches and properties, to the archbishop at his death. In the 13th century Reculver was a