names now lost, were probably represented among the settlers in Kent under the name of Jutes. Of these Jutes, the Goths were probably the more numerous, seeing that the name adopted for the Kentish people generally was a modified form of Gutæ, a name for their own race.
The traditional freedom of the people of this county, and the still older traditional freedom of the Frisians, confirm the other evidence, anthropological as well as philological, which connects Kent with ancient Friesland. The old laws of the Frisians declare ‘that the race shall be free as long as the winds blow out of the clouds and the world stands.’[1]
The Frisians, with the Batavians of what is now Holland, came under the dominion of Charlemagne, who confirmed their laws and left them their native customs.[2] The personal freedom of the people of Kent was their most highly prized birthright, derived from their tribal ancestors, and has been commemorated by Dryden in the following lines referring to that county:
‘Among the English shires be thou surnamed the free,
And foremost ever placed when they shall numbered be.’
This last line, about being placed first, refers to another remarkable Kentish custom or claim—viz., that of being marshalled in the van of the national army when being led to war. This claim was one of the warlike privileges of the men of Kent, and was recognised throughout the period of their early history. As will be shown later on, it was a claim which was also recognised and allowed to Kentish settlers in another part of England.
There may have been more than one Baltic homeland of the Jutes, and Witland, east of the Vistula, may have been one of them. Wulfstan, in narrating his voyage up the Baltic to King Alfred, says that Witland[3] was east of
