346 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



the water was low and it was ebb, cast up on the Thames 

 banks high and strong earth-walls which prevent the 

 water overflowing the country inside the walls, which is 

 mostly bare meadow land and pastures. 



The breadth of these walls or banks down at their 

 base was 4, 5, or 6 fathoms, the height above the plain 

 i£ fathoms, the width at the top about 1 fathom, some- 

 times barely 4 to 6 feet, so that they on both sides 

 diminished gradually in width from their base to their 

 top. Outside, against the river at the base of the wall* 

 pile-work, p&lverke, which they took from old ships, 

 was driven down compactly together, everywhere one 

 row thereof. But in some places were two rows of such 

 pile-work, one a little within the other. Immediately 

 within the piles were laid a large number of lumps of 

 chalk,* together with large flints, to bind the wall against 



* " Tiers of piles driven close to each other, in rows about 18 inches 

 apart, row from row, the foot of one tier being nearly even with the middle 

 of the piles of the tier below, and the space between the tiers filled with 

 chalk or stone, and these rooms, as they are called, succeeding each other, 

 from the bottom or foot of the bank to its top." Wiggins' Embanking Lands 

 from the Sea [p. 215, Ed. 1867], Weale's Series, 1852, i2mo. [J. L.] 



between the gutter of Borstall and the new wall which Johannes Renger 

 made in Heyflete, which wall they will for one month following maintain, 

 ' contra mare,' against the sea at their own cost," &c, &c. It seems as though 

 Joh. Renger had finished his portion of the wall necessary to complete the 

 inning of this large tract of marsh before the Abbots had done quarrelling, and 

 that the original inning took place in 1279 according to the Annates, and 

 1281 according to Thorn. These marshes lay drowned again, through the 

 breaches formed in 1522 (probably from the rotting of the wood of the 'water- 

 gangs ' under the walls) for seventy-five years, or till 1606. Lambarde, 

 writing in 1570, says : ' The Great Breach is not yet made up' (Peram Ed., 

 1826, 8vo., p. 396). As many other breaches from the same cause occurred 

 for two centuries or more up to the beginning of the 18th century on both 

 sides of the Thames, it is probable that all of the Thames walls so breached 

 within that period are of the same epoch. As far as I know there is no other 

 record of the first making of a wall but this. [J. L.] 



