155
DAGENHAM BREACH.
The present course, however, is entirely due to the hand and mind
of man; for without his restraining influence, exhibited by the long
line of embankments on both sides of its length, from Kew down-
wards to below Tilbury, the river would long ago have broken away
from its present channel, inundating at one place, and casting up the
debris at another; scouring out a new course as its waters rushed
along. At what periods the earliest embankments were formed is a
matter for conjecture. Camden, Dugdale, and others considered
them the work of the Romans ; perhaps they made the start, for
they were workers as well as fighters, and have left us substantial
remains of their strength and skill; but, so far as I am aware, we
have no evidence to prove this; and we are too old to believe any
longer the story of our childhood, which transformed the stakes
which hold the mud together into the weathered thigh-bones of their
dauntless soldiers.3
But we do know that the various owners of land and marsh abut-
ting on the river border have been constantly engaged, as far back as
we can go, in repairing and reforming these artificial boundaries;
and that where neglect in so doing has occurred, the penalty has
been paid in the shape of serious damages by flooding and great
inundations — that the giant river has aroused now and again,
stretched out his mighty arms, devastated large tracts, and paralysed
for a while the strongest efforts of man.
We have, however, positive information of the first enclosure of
Plumstead Marsh, which extended to Lesnes, in a folio MS.:
"Augustini Eccl: Cantuar: Annales," under the year 1279.
"Eodem anno inclusus erat primo mariscus de Plumstede per
Abbatern de Lessnes mari."4 This marsh, on the right bank of
the river, nearly opposite, was again inundated in 1522, through a
breach in the wall at Erith, and the land was not wholly recovered
until 1606.
Nowhere, perhaps, can we better see and comprehend than at
this spot the artificial character of the river boundaries; and the
words written some twenty years ago by our Hon. Member, Henry
Walker, F.G.S., in his "Rambles round London" (1871), will give
3 The reader may he referred to Mr. F. C. J. Spurrell's important paper in the "Archaeo-
logical Journal" (vol. xlii., p. 269), entitled "Early Sites and Embankments on the Margins of
the Thames Estuary," for information as to the probable periods of the formation of the early
embankments. Mr. Spurrell is inclined to class them all as comparatively modern—the earliest
as clearly post-Roman, and probably mediaeval.—Ed.
4 Vide Lambarde, "Perambulation of Kent, 1576," who quotes from the original MS. in
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.