JAMES BRINDLEY AND THE

EARLY ENGINEERS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

IT has taken the labour and the skill of many generations of men to make England the country that it now is; to reclaim and subdue its lands for purposes of agriculture, to build its towns and supply them with water, to render it easily accessible by means of roads, bridges, canals, and railways, and to construct lighthouses, breakwaters, docks, and harbours for the protection and accommodation of its commerce. Those great works have been the result of the continuous industry of the nation, and the men who have designed and executed them are entitled to be regarded in a great measure as the founders of modern England.

Engineering, like architecture, strikingly marks the several stages which have occurred in the development of society, and throws much curious light upon history. The ancient British encampment, of which many specimens are still to be found on the summits of hills, with occasional indications of human dwellings within them in the circular hollows or pits over which huts once stood,-the feudal castle perched upon its all but inaccessible rock, provided with drawbridge and portcullis to secure its occupants against sudden assault, then the moated dwelling, situated in the midst of the champaign country, indicating a growing, though as yet but half-hearted confidence in the loyalty of

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neighbours, and, lastly, the modern mansion, with its drawing-room windows opening level with the sward of the adjacent country, all these are not more striking indications of social progress at the different stages in our history, than the reclamation and cultivation of lands won from the sea, the making of roads and building of bridges, the supplying of towns with water, and the construction of canals and railroads for the ready conveyance of persons and merchandise throughout the empire.

In England, as in all countries, men began with making provision for food and shelter. The valleys and low-lying grounds being mostly covered with dense forests, the naturally cleared high lands, where timber would not grow, were doubtless occupied by the first settlers. Tillage was not as yet understood nor practised; the people subsisted by hunting, or upon their herds of cattle, which found ample grazing among the hills of Dartmoor, and on the grassy downs of Wiltshire and Sussex. Numerous remains or traces of ancient dwellings have been found in those districts, as at Bowhill in Sussex, along the skirts of Dartmoor where the hills slope down to the watercourses, and on the Wiltshire downs, where Old Sarum, Stonehenge and Avebury, mark the earliest and most flourishing of the British settlements.

The art of reclaiming, embanking, and draining land, is supposed to have been introduced by men from Belgium and Friesland, who early landed in great numbers along the south-eastern coasts, and made good their footing by the power of numbers, as well as probably by their superior civilization. The lands from which they came had been won by skill and industry from the sea and from the fen; and when they swarmed over into England, they brought their arts with them. The early settlement of Britain by the races which at present occupy it, is usually spoken of as a series of invasions and conquests; but it is probable that it was for the most part effected by a system of colonization, such as is going forward at this day in America, Australia,

and New Zealand; and that the immigrants from Friesland, Belgium, and Jutland, secured their settlement by the spade far more than by the sword. Wherever the new men came, they settled themselves down on their several bits of land, which became their holdings; and they bent their backs over the stubborn soil, watering it with their sweat; and delved, and drained, and cultivated it, until it became fruitful. They also spread themselves over the richer arable lands of the interior, the older population receding before them to the hunting and pastoral grounds of the north and west. Thus the men of Teutonic race gradually occupied the whole of the reclaimable land, and became dominant, as is shown by the dominancy of their language, until they were stopped by the hills of Cumberland, of Wales, and of Cornwall. The same process seems to have gone on in the arable districts of Scotland, into which a swarm of colonists from Northumberland poured in the reign of David I., and quietly settled upon the soil, which they proceeded to cultivate. It is a remarkable confirmation of this view of the early settlement of the country by its present races, that the modern English language extends over the whole of the arable land of England and Scotland, and the Celtic tongue only begins where the plough ends.

One of the most extensive districts along the English coast, lying the nearest to the country from which the continental immigrants first landed, was the tract of Romney Marsh, containing about 60,000 acres of land along the south coast of Kent. The reclamation of this tract is supposed to be due to the Frisians. English history does not reach so far back as the period at which Romney Marsh was first reclaimed, but doubtless the work is one of great antiquity. The district is about fourteen miles long and eight broad, divided into Romney Marsh, Wallend Marsh, Denge Marsh, and Guildford Marsh. The tract is a dead, uniform level, extending from Hythe, in Kent, westward to Winchelsea, in Sussex; and it is to this day held from the

sea by a continuous wall or bank, on the solidity of which the preservation of the district depends, the surface of the marsh being under the level of the sea at the highest tides. The following descriptive view of the marsh, taken from the high ground above the ancient Roman fortress of Portus Limanis, near the more modern but still ancient castle of Lymne, will give an idea of the extent and geographical relations of the district.

Descriptive View of Romney Marsh, from Lymne Castle.

The tract is so isolated, that the marshmen say the world is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Romney Marsh. It contains few or no trees, its principal divisions being formed by dykes and watercourses. It is thinly peopled, but abounds in cattle and sheep of a peculiarly hardy breed, which are a source of considerable wealth to the marshmen; and it affords sufficient grazing for more than half a million of sheep, besides numerous herds of cattle.