Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/201

Rh very convex profile, head narrow, rather elongated, and very much rounded off at the sides, very long neck, and narrow shoulders.’ These physical characters may still be observed in the county, and more particularly in its western parts.

The ancient Goths, one of the noblest of the old European races, have long since disappeared. Their identity has been almost entirely lost in the birth of new nations. If we seek for any remnants of the old stock, we shall find them, such as they are, in the Dalecarlians of Sweden, among whom the custom of partible inheritance still survives. The Goths were the people most advanced in civilization of the nations in the Scandian peninsula, and we must trace to the parent Gothic stock many of the qualities of the present races of Scandinavia and the northern parts of Germany. They have disappeared, but the newer nations which sprang from them have preserved until our own time their love of liberty. If we trace it to its ultimate source, England is Gothic by birth, and Kent pre-eminently so. The Kentish man’s liberty was his marked characteristic in the Middle Ages—a characteristic which had come down to him from the earliest Kentish settlers. Descended partly from Frisians—who were themselves, as the remnant of their ancient language shows, also of the old Gothic stock—and strongly marked by their love of freedom, the people of Kent preserved, through all the changes of the Anglo-Saxon period and the later powerful influences of feudalism, their free institutions, the relics of which, in the customs incidental to the gavelkind land tenure, have come down to our time. There is, perhaps, no survival in the length or breadth of England that is as remarkable as this.

Under the laws of Æthelbert, the Kentish ceorl was a freeman, and we read of him later in the laws of subsequent Kings. It was the proudest privilege of birth in Kent in the Middle Ages that every man so born, or whose