father was so born, was free from those obligations of personal service which inferior tenants in other counties were bound to fulfil. The Kentish man was free to move, and if he went into another county and some lord of the manor claimed villein services from him, it was a good answer in law if he pleaded his father’s Kentish birth.[1] This privilege of personal freedom, which is now the birth-right of every Englishman, was only the birthright of the people of one of our present counties in the period of feudal domination—viz., the people of Kent. Many other people who were inferior tenants on manors elsewhere were more or less freemen. Their number collectively was great, but no other instance occurs of any county in which all the people born in it, or whose fathers were born in it, were personally free. In this respect there was, perhaps, only one other area of local government which could be compared to Kent with all its privileges, and that was the City of London. In London every man from the earliest time was personally free if born there.
One of the general conclusions which an examination of the Anglo-Saxon relics found in England leads to is the similarity that many of them exhibit in design and ornamentation to those of early date, before the later so-called Viking period, which have been discovered in the Scandinavian peninsula—the home of the Northern Goths. From whatever source they acquired their knowledge of iron-working and its accompanying arts of metallurgy and gilding, the Goths certainly introduced this knowledge and art into the Scandian peninsula. These arts were much practised by the Gauls until the fall of the Roman Empire, after which they were lost in the South; but as they had been acquired by the Goths of Scandinavia, they were preserved and developed by them in the North, where they were unaffected by the great wars which marked the decline and fall of the Empire in other parts of Europe.[2] These lost arts were thus recovered
