File:The making of England (1900) (14765084975).jpg

Identifier: makingofenglan01gree (find matches)
Title: The making of England
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors: Green, John Richard, 1837-1883
Subjects:
Publisher: London : Macmillan
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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hames inan estuary of its own, an estuary which ran far tothe north over as wide an expanse of marsh andfen, while at its mouth it stretched its tidal watersover the mud flats which have been turned byembankment into the Isle of Dogs.^ Near thepoint where the two rivers meet, a traveller who 1 Guest, Aiilus Plautius, Origines Celticae, ii. 403. Whenthe Romans under Aulus Plautius came down the WatlingStreet to the neighbourhood of London, they saw beforethem a wide expanse of marsh and mud bank, which twiceevery day assumed the character of an estuary sufficiently largeto excuse, if not to justify, the statement of Dion, that the riverthere emptie-i itself into the ocean. No dykes then retainedthe water witliin certain limits. One arm of this great washstretched northward up the valley of the Lea, and the otherwestward up the valley of the Thames. The name of Londonrefers directly to the marshes, though I cannot here enter on aphilological argument to prove the fact (p. 405). VOL. I I
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THE MAKING OF ENGLAND 115 was mounting the Thames from the sea saw the Chap. hi.first dry land to which his bark could steer. The Conq^stsspot was in fact the extremity of a low line of saxonlrising ground which was thrown out from the c. 500^77.heights of Hampstead that border the river valleyto the north, and which passed over the sites ofour Hyde Park and Holborn to thrust itself onthe east into the great morass. This easternportion of it, however, was severed from the restof the rise by the deep gorge of a stream that fellfrom the northern hills, the stream of the Fleet,whose waters, long since lost in London sewers,ran in earlier days between steep banks—banksthat still leave their impress in the local levels,and in local names like Snow Hill—to the Thamesat Blackfriars. The rise or dun that stretched from this Not atidal channel of the Fleet to the spot now marked Town!by the Tower, and which was destined to becomethe site of London, rose at its highest some fiftyfeet above

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