ment at rather more than ninety, making in all some hundred and sixty miles of river wall, varying in height from three feet, as at Fulham, to seventeen, as at West Thurrock Marsh, and excluding from the calcination all street embankments.
The extent of land thus rescued from a condition which made cultivation impossible, and which must have impregnated the atmosphere with an amount of humidity bearing a strong resemblance to the overhanging mists of the lacustrine era of which geologists tell us, is not easily calculated. In such levels a trifling elevation makes an immense difference, but it may suffice for present purposes to calculate it at somewhere about 6700 acres. Of this, nearly all the above-bridge portion and all below bridge, as far as Deptford and Greenwich, consists of market-garden ground, let at wonderful rents, cultivated with a care and economy almost astounding, and contributing a very large proportion of the treasures of Covent Garden and the Borough Markets. From Greenwich to the sea, the thousands of head of cattle which dot the “mashes” (as they are called in the neighbourhood), to say nothing of the constantly recurring rubbing-post, the discovery of whose utility occasioned Sidney Smith so much diversion, unmistakeably denote grazing lands, and it is hence that the metropolitan meat-markets derive a very large proportion of their supply.
To what era, and to whose energy, foresight, and ingenuity to ascribe this great work of national usefulness, seems a point of secondary importance. There are the banks, and how they came there seems an inquiry of vastly inferior moment to the question how to keep them up. We may, however, be allowed a small space even for the less material consideration. Both Dugdale, and, after him. Sir C. Wren, agree in ascribing the earliest embanking works in England to the Romans, or rather to the Britons working under their orders, and groaning heavily the while over the wearing out of their bodies and hands in the labour; but others (and among them Cruden, the historian of the Port of London), ask, with an awkward look of probability, how, if the Thames embankments are Roman, no notice of them is found until long after the Norman Conquest? and how all account of the lands rescued is omitted from the Domesday Survey? Without wading through the tangled thicket of arguments pro and con—guesses, speculations, and deductions which environ the subject—it will be quite enough to say that the most reasonable account seems to point to an origin which has an exact parallel in the history of the levée de la Loire. This embankment—the origin of which French geographers date as far back as the days of Charlemagne and of Louis le Débonnaire—is said to have consisted in the first instance only of small isolated dykes, which the neighbouring seigneurs made their peasantry erect in order to preserve and protect their estates from the inroads of the river. By degrees, these separate dykes were run into that one large work of which Frenchmen are very naturally proud.
Now, the uplands on each side of the River Thames below London, and with these the swamps which fringed them, were in large measure bestowed on ecclesiastical bodies in very early times. The Abbey of Stratford, for instance, was founded and endowed in 1135, and that of Lesnes (Abbey Wood hodie) in 1178. On the one shore were this Stratford Abbey, the famous Nunnery at Barking, the Cell at Gray’s Thurrock, St. Osyth, and others; and on the south shore Lesnes, Dartford, Ingress, &c. The monks and nuns, finding themselves not unfrequently flooded out of their dwellings, and obliged to seek refuge in the higher lands, very early set on foot a process of what was called then, and for many centuries, “inning” their marsh-lands, that is, enclosing them with embankments; and, as early as Henry the Second’s time, this process began to be deemed a matter of national importance. It is remarkable, by the way, that to the same monarch—as Count of Anjou—the French historians ascribe the consolidation of the great Loire embankment. But that from the time of Edward the Second downwards, the “inning” process continued to be considered a national affair, is evidenced by the perpetually recurring commissions to Aaew and take order for the repair of the banks, ditches, &c., and for the safeguard of the marshes from the overflowing of the tide, as well as by the continued assessments or taxes on the neighbourhood granted for defraying the expenses of the works. According to the ride of these more advanced days, however, there is also to be detected a constantly recurring difficulty in collecting the taxes. No one seems to have thought those days of remitting conscience-money to in the Lord High Treasurer, or whoever did duty as the legitimate predecessor of Mr. Gladstone. The works remained uncompleted, the low-lands were constantly overflowed, and at length private enterprise stepped in to supply public torpor—and not without making a good bargain for itself out of the transaction. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s days, “one Jacobus Aconcius, an Italian,” undertook to “in” about 2000 acres of drowned land in Plumstead and Erith Marshes, on condition of getting one half of his recovery in fee-simple for his pains. In 1622, one Jonas Croppenburg, a Dutchman, made a similar bargain about Canvey Island; only, more modest than Jacobus, he restricted his demand to one-third of the land recovered; and about the same time one Cornelius Vermuyden, a German, undertook the recovery of Dagenham and Havering Marshes on similar conditions. The same Vermuyden, some thirty years later, when he is described as a Colonel of Horse under Cromwell, superintended the rescue of something between four and five hundred thousand acres of similar land in the counties of Lincoln, Cambridge, and Hunts, and must have been a genius and a man well ahead of his age.
By some such processes, then, as these, it seems most probable that the Thames embankments gradually crawled into existence during the centuries which intervened between the days of the Second Henry and those of the Protector, comparatively small detached portions of embankment being pushed forward, like military outworks, from the higher lands first of all, and by degrees being extended and united, until the work resolved itself