Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Herefordshire, and Cambridgeshire.[1] We can trace them from Kent up the Thames valley. Whatever the privilege of the cottar may have been (and it is generally agreed that he had a cottage and a few acres of land, which he cultivated himself when not working for his lord), it is certain that the man in this position, by whatever name he was called, was more free in Kent than in any other county, and probably better off in other respects. It is of interest, therefore, to trace the existence of the cottar in other counties into which Kentish people may have migrated, or people of the same races as those from which the Kentish people were descended may have settled. These were mainly the freedom-loving Frisians and Goths, collectively called Jutes. The cottar was a freeman subject to certain manorial customs. He paid his hearth penny—i.e., his Rome scot or Peter’s pence—on Holy Thursday, as every freeman did; he worked for the lord one day in the week and three days in harvest time, and he had five acres more or less.[2] This class of manorial tenants was relatively large in Middlesex and Surrey at the time of the Domesday Survey. If they existed in Essex, they are not mentioned, and this circumstance alone points to Kent rather than to Essex as the State from which colonists settled in Middlesex—i.e., rather to Frisians and Goths than the so-called Saxons of Essex. The cottars of Middlesex lived at Fulham, St. Pancras or Kentish Town, Islington, Drayton, Staines, Hanwell, Harmondsworth, Sunbury, Greenford, Shepperton, Enfield, Tottenham, and other places. These Middlesex cottars, like the Middlesex villeins, the next class of manorial tenant above them, were more important persons and more free in their holdings than villeins and borderers in other counties usually were. This, again, points to early migrations from Kent, and to the influence of the great city on the country round it.
