'et debent wallas custodire et defendere contra friscam et salsam, et quoties opus fuerit eas reparare, et firmas facere secundam legem et consuetudinem marisci.'

6

In the days of our Henrys and our Edwards' scarcely a year passed without commissions concerning the embankments of Romney Marsh, and commissions for other marshes were to act according to the laws of Romne marsh.'

The ordinance of Henry de Bathe, constituted at Romney, A.D. 1258, is the Magna Charta of marsh defence throughout England. But it alludes to the ancient laws and customs of Romney Marsh thereanent; and indeed it seems founded entirely on these antiquas et approbatas consuetudines.'

To come to modern times and to physical causes, the natives of this delta to a man will tell you that the land was left by the sea,' and they talk of the sea receding.

6

But if the sea receded here it would recede at Folkestone, Hastings, and Beachy Head, where on the contrary it advances on the land. But if left by the sea' means washed up by the sea, nothing can be more clear than the distinction between what is washed up by the sea and what is washed down by the river. What the sea casts up here is simply shingle and sand, worth perhaps three farthings a year rent as pasture, and as for ploughing it no one but Ulysses would attempt it.

But in the delta and the alluvial plain together
there are 62,449 acres embanked and drained,
which perhaps average above three pounds an
acre rent. Now the whole of this land has been
brought down by rain and the river. Man has
held more or less of these acres for the last 2000
years. When nature held this farm direct under
the Almighty, I imagine that the river had three
outlets, as is usual in deltas; a main central
trunk from Craven Bridge to Romney, and two
side outlets, one towards Hythe, and one towards
Rye and Winchelsea. When the central Romney
river overflowed its even self-built banks, the
heaviest materials held in suspension were soonest
dropped, and the plain formed sloped from the
central river to the two side outlets, where the
floodwater, together with the adjacent streams
escaped into the sea. Man, by embanking, has
altered all this. There is now no longer any up-
ward growth of the plain, or as it is here called
'swarving up.' On the contrary, as the water is
let off by sluices through the beach at low water,
the plain is exposed to denudation, and may pro-
bably be considerably lower now than it was in
the time of the Romans. All that the river brings
down is now forced directly into the sea.
causes a vast accumulation of sand at Rye har-
bour, and an extension of the delta there by depo-

F

This Embankment

of new land

still goes on.

Only mud

goes out to sea.

sition. Indeed it is not only that the emkankment of derelict land,' as it is called, goes on to this day, but it may almost be called compulsory. For instance, the corporation of Rye embanked marshes in 1833, which they wished to preserve as reservoirs of tidal water to scour the mouth of the harbour. But these marshes 'swarved up' so as only to be covered at the highest spring tides, and thus became useless as reservoirs for scouring. Here a present of land was forced on the corporation against its will by rain and rivers which from its nearness to the town is perhaps worth a rent of £5 or £6 per acre. About 1853, Lord H. Vane enclosed land on the great stone side of what was Romney harbour, and the corporation of Romney are in the act of enclosing now (written 1861) on the little stone side of this quod Cantianite dicitur

swarved up' harbour. Vast accumulations of sand are going on outside the mouth of the Rother. On this foundation the river will deposit the richest land, and Rye will be left inland as Newenden has been left inland.

But however capacious the mouth of the sea it can only swallow the finest possible food, that which is held in suspension in water. All the rest which rain and rivers bring down the sea masticates on the shore, in the form of sand, shingle, and boulders; and of these the sea

flints which

throws up a wall for the protection of deltas against itself. And most wonderful are the collections of beach from Fairlight Cliff to Rye Harbour, at Dengeness and at Hythe; and I imagine that of the flints which pervaded the The chalk enormous mass of chalk which once overarched covered the Weald the Weald Hill, some from the south side may at Hill. this instant be denizens of the beaches from Dover to the Land's End. Some may have supported the foot of Julius Cæsar at his (much discussed) landing-place. Some may have been equally civil to William of Normandy at Pevensey, others to the third William in Torbay; while from the north side these flints still help to bed the valley of the Thames, and proudly support Queen Victoria, and all that shines so exquisitely in female form in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Eastward at Dengeness some still silicify the pointed pyramid of the delta of the Rother. Westward I think that they probably bed the The Itchen upper valley of the Itchen, from Bordean by the Weald Bramdean and Tichborne to Winchester. For I think it probable that the ancient Itchen once took its source in the chalk above what is now 'the Wealden heights,' that is, the Forest Ridge of the Weald Hill, and that the dry valleylet from Froxfield by Stapley to Bordean is on the point of changing (as other valleylets have done) from

once rose on

Hill.

The waterArun is still waterslope of

slope of the

the Itchen.

Romney and Hythe once cinque ports.

the waterslope of the Itchen to the waterslope of the Arun.

We must not expect to find these flints on the surface of the Weald except as exceptions. When they walked their chalks, Crowborough beacon and the heights of the Forest Ridge were covered full fathom five, not only by kindred beds of their own long gone, such as the Horsted beds but by the depth of the Weald clay, the upper and lower greensands and the gault. When as exceptions (as at Barcombe) flints are found on the surface of the Weald, they are angular, which proves the atmospheric denudation of the Weald. If the denudation had been marine the flints should be rolled pebbles.

Some may hesitate to believe the possibility of the advance of the land of the delta of the Rother into the sea, that it should be able to thrust out an enormous pyramidal cape into the sea at the very moment that the sea is advancing on the land on both sides of it, and tearing down the neighbouring cliffs of Folkestone, Hastings, and Beachy Head. Any is Greek for portus. Hythe Saxon for port. Some may doubt if the little inland hamlet Lympne was Ptolemy's Xavo λny, or the Roman portus Lemanis, or portus novus. Though it still has its Roman castle, its Roman road to Canterbury--Stone Street, and thence to