Men—­at least the men of our race—­have made everything for themselves; and they will never cease.  They continue to extend and possess.  It is not only the architecture; it is the very landscape of Europe which has been made by Europeans.  In what way did we begin to form this difficult place, which is neither earth nor water, and in which we might have despaired?  It was conquered by human artifice, of course, somewhat as Frisia and the Netherlands, and, as we may believe, the great bay of the Cotentin were conquered; but it has certain special characters of its own, and these again are due to the value in this place of the tides, and to the absence of those natural dykes of sand which were, a thousand years ago, the beginnings of Holland.

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Two methods, working side by side, have from the beginning of human habitation reclaimed the Fens.  The first has been the canalisation, the fencing in of the tideways; the second has been the banking out of the general sea.  The spring tides covered much of this land, and when they retired left it drowned.  Against their universal advancing sheet of water a bank could be made.  Such a bank cut off the invasion of the hundreds of runnels, small and great, by which the more ordinary tides that could not cover the surface had yet crept into the soil and soaked it through.

When such a bank had been built, gates, as it were, permitted the water to spend its force and also to use its ebb and flow for the draining of the land beyond.  The gates which let the tide pour up and down the main ways became the new mouths of the main rivers; inland the courses of the rivers (which now took all the sea and thus became prodigious) were carefully guarded.  Even before trenches were dug to drain the fields around, earth was thrown up on either side of the rivers to confine them each to one permanent channel; nor did the level of the rivers rise, or their beds gets clogged; the strength of the tide sufficed for the deepening of their channels.  Into the rivers so fortified the other waterways of the Fens were conducted.

By these methods alone much of the land was rendered habitable and subject to the plough.  Probably these methods were enough to make it all it was in the Middle Ages.  It was only far later, almost in our own time, that water was gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the rivers and pumped out artificially with mills; nor is it quite certain even now that this method (borrowed from Holland) is the best; for the land, as I have said, is above and not below the sea.

Of these words, whose tradition is immemorial, the greatest, of course, are the sea-walls.

Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great bank which limited and protected the land against the sea is also older than any history.