London above bridge is an inland city, the English capital; below bridge it is a great seaport. In a description of England, published in 1753, I find this: “That part of the Thames, which is properly the harbour, is called the Pool, and begins at the turning out of Limehouse Reach and extends to the Custom House quays. In this compass I had the curiosity to count the ships, and I have found about 2000 sail of all sorts of vessels that really go to sea.” In a twelfth-century rhyme on English towns are the words, “London for ships most.” Bede describes London as a great ship port. The city is placed just where the Thames widened into an estuary. At Battersea the river was little wider two thousand years ago than at present; it overflowed wide spaces of marsh about Westminster and again contracted by London. Her high ground came close to the water on the north, and on the Southwark side there was only a narrow margin of low ground. Directly to the east of London was the low land called in the Middle Ages “Wapping Marsh” (_Middlesex Feet of Fines_). In the Pepys collection at Cambridge I have seen an engraved plan of “Lands by Wall or Wapping Marsh, 1683: seven acres of land in which the millponds and ditches did all over dispersedly lie.” Stow tells of Limehouse marshes being “drowned.” Before the lower Thames was embanked the river must have been two or three miles wide, at every tide, a little below London, where the considerable little river, the Lea, runs into it. The higher ground of the site of London is in the angle formed by the Thames and Lea, and is the extremity of the northern hills, Highgate and Islington. From the hills several streams flowed through deeply excavated beds into the Thames. The most considerable of these was the Fleet; the smaller Walbrook intersected the site of the city. Conyers in his MS. at the British Museum noted how the Fleet was embanked in 1675 with material taken from old St. Paul’s, “to narrow-in the spreading breadth of Fleet River.... The waters overflowed these parts in the old times.” The general topographical conditions were well observed by Drayton in _Polyolbion_—The city was built on a rising bank of gravel and sand, surrounded by lower ground: the tide flowing up the Lea and Fleet prevented the town from growing too long: to the north and south of the Thames were ranges of hills: “And such a road for ships scarce all the world commands.”