158 History of Inland Transport 



Of these ports the majority have ceased to be available 

 for the purposes of foreign commerce. Dunwich, once a con- 

 siderable town, the seat of a bishopric, and the metropolis 

 of East Anglia, had its harbour and its royal and episcopal 

 palaces swept away by encroachments of the sea. Hedon, 

 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, returned two members of 

 Parliament in the reign of Edward I., and was a more im- 

 portant centre of trade and commerce than Hull ; but its 

 harbour, getting choked up by sand, was converted into a 

 luxuriant meadow, and the ports of Hull and Grimsby now 

 reign in its stead. Sandwich, Romney, Hythe, all the Cinque 

 ports except Dover, and various other ports, got choked up 

 with sand, while others that have been able to retain a certain 

 amount of traffic are to-day only the ghosts of their former 

 selves. 



It is certain that in the case of English navigable rivers of 

 any type, much might require to be done, and spent, in order 

 to keep navigation open. With most of them it was a matter 

 of carrying on an unceasing warfare with elemental conditions. 

 Patriotic men like Sandys, Mathew and Yarranton might 

 bring forward their schemes, companies might raise and spend 

 much money on river navigation, and municipal corpora- 

 tions might do what they could, within the range of their 

 means and powers ; but the inherent defects and limitations 

 of the navigation itself were not always to be overcome by 

 any practical combination of patriotism, enterprise and 

 generous expenditure even when and this was far from 

 being always the case the requisite funds were actually 

 available. 



Vernon-Harcourt is of opinion that " the regulation, im- 

 provement and control of rivers constitute one of the most 

 important, and, at the same time, one of the most difficult, 

 branches of civil engineering " ; and this difficulty must 

 have been found still greater in the last half of the seventeenth 

 and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, when river 

 improvement was engaging so much attention, but when 

 civil engineering was far less advanced than is the case to-day. 



Whatever, too, the degree of success attained in the efforts 

 made to overcome the results of floods and droughts, of 

 shoals and shallows, of river mouths choked by sand washed 

 in from the estuaries, of streams unduly broad from lack of 



