The literary evidence for the foundation of this kingdom is bound up with the 'legend' of Vortigern. The story is first given by Gildas, the British born priest who was born about A.D. 500, without names or dates; but on the strength of eighth century Kent, the Venearable Bede called the 'proud tyrant' Vortigern and the enemy chieftains, Hengist and Horsa, and he identifies the latter as Jutes, not Saxons; the 'Early English Annals' were content to copy Bede, by the time of Nennius the affair is embroidered with romance of a vivid but quite incredible nature.

Put briefly, the story goes that Votigern, a king of Kent, when hard pressed by the attacks of the Scots from Ireland and the Picts from the north, operating presumably from the sea, turned in desperation to the Saxons and offered them the island of Thanet on condition that they assisted him in his measures of defence. Once given a footing, they consolidated their position, obtained reinforcements from abroad,provoked a quarrel with Vortigern, overthrew him, and mercilessly looted and destroyed Romano-British towns, and devastated the countryside over a wide area. According to Gildas their raiding in time 'licked the western oceon with its red and savage tongue'.
In spite of the thoroughgoing scepticism of some historians the story is not improbable, based as it is on genuine folk-tradition. The romanized municipalities had felt that they could no longer cope with the deteriorating situation and in 446 had made their frantic but futile appeal for help to Rome (the letter mentioned by Gildas and generally known under the title of 'The Groans of Britons'). The dissolution of the draditional government provided throughout the Empire and opportunity for native tribal chieftains to seize power into their own hands; soVortigern came to dominate the country on both sides of theThames and not simply Kent alone.

When the perils seemed likely to overwhelm him, he adopted a device commonly practiced at the time; he negotiated with some of the barbarian attackers, admitted them within the frontiers and gave them land in return for their support. But, as happened time and time again elsewhere the 'helpers' grew restless, enlarged their ambitions and shookoff the control of their patron. From that point there began the settlement of the whole southeastern area.

Kent has always seemed to be a district apart, geographically it is practically a peninsular and from the earliest recorded times it stood out in marked contrast to the rest of England; the men of Kent were freer to live their own lives as they desired, they early engaged in cross-channel commerce, they had a higher standard of living, they had their own way of doing things which eventually received comprehensive acknowledgement as the 'custom of Kent.Distinctions are noticeable from the very start, and historians are at least of one opinion that the early archaeological remains in Kent are closely parallel to those of Frankish Middle Rhine and quite unlike any to be found either in the northwest of Germany or in any other part of Britain. But there agreement ends, for various explanations have been advanced to explain how Frankish culture came to establish itself in the south-east.

If in the discussion we continue to use the term'Jutes' it is because the authority of Bede has sanctioned the usage, but we are abandoning his ingenious and unfortunate afterthought, based on a similarity of names, which associated a Germanic people called the 'Jutes' with the district called Jutland.

It has been vigorously argued among scholars that the whole coastal area from Kent as far west as Hampshire was settled about the middle of the fifith century by people of one kind and one custom. The individual property-rights of the Kentish peasants, signalized throughout the centuries by the special practice of 'Gavelkind' whereby land continued to be divided among all heirs instead of passing to the eldest son only, the agricultural self-sufficiency of their hamlets, the organization of their large territorial units called 'lathes' to make easier and equitable exploitation of the forest land of the Weild and ultimately to serve as divisions for fiscal and government purposes; all such characteristics, it is claimed, can be traced outside Kent throughout the south eastern counties.

Since this area has a close relationship with the Middle Rhine, and shows remarkable points of resemblance to the Frankish practices there in its method of burial by exhumation, its system of agriculture, its customary laws and in particular its statistic achievements in fine wheel-made pottery, precious jewels for personal adornment, and the filigree and enamel work of expert jewellers craft, it is contended that the Jutes where Ripurian Franks who had moved to the lower Rhine and crossed the sea to Britain. Their wanderings in that case were part and parcel of the Frankish migrations, which had earlier resulted in their occupation of north Gaul. Thus both sides of the channel came into their hands, and the eventual marraige of King Ethelbert of Kent to a daughter of the Merovingian king of the Franks before 597 might be interpreted as an attempt to maintain and emphasize the identical interests of the Frankish people. So a Jutish colonization had taken place fully a generation before the Saxons, especially the West Saxons, began to expand, and to do this these had to subdue what was, so far as they were concerned, an 'alien civilisation'. They never succeeded in obliterating its impress, though their own Saxon ideas naturally predominated in time. This thesis leaves too much unexplained and goes too far out of the way to explain the rest.

We know that the Saxons had been raiding the shores of Britain for many generations but there is not a scrap of evidence about the sea adventures of the Franks or of the immense preparations required to transport a whole people on their novel journey overseas. Furthermore, when we call them Jutes or Franks, they have left no memorial of themselves in place-names; British and Irish Celts, Saxons and Angles will all express their racial origin in this way and it is at least noteworthy that the inhabitants of Kent style themselves 'men of Cantware' and in doing so recognise their early association with the Britons of this highly romanized district, for they have adopted a British name.

It is by no means impossible that some of the Kentish distinctions are based in part on Romano-British influence, for we have aready observed that the future conquerers lived for some time with their destined victims on negotiated terms and must have acquired some knowledge of their ways. It is difficult in any other manner to account for the fact that Kent alone preserved a resemblance of its Roman past in the pattern of early settlement. We may therefore justly suspect that the 'consolidated fields' of the Kentish hamlets so apposed to the 'strip' system elsewhere, may hold a memory of pre-Saxon agricultural arrangements, that the unusually detailed classification of society are due to the presence of peasants of Romano-British descent, that the British craftsman remained to preserve and improve the native arts they had cherished so long.

The crux of the problem of the Jutes in Kent could be resolved if only we could date precisely the archaeological discoveries including those artifacts now coming to light in abundance from metal detectorists; that we can merely place them in their topographical order and confess that we do not know how long the intervals were between the making of one object and the making of another. For the moment it is safer to believe that the flowering of Kentish culture with its Frankish traits occured about 600 A.D. when Ethelbert was at the height of his power.

I shall continue my journey through Sussex, Essex, Surrey and Middlesex and then on to East Anglia and Mercia.