Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/204

190 France the Læti are known as soldiers of the Empire, or their descendants.

There is, however, another view by which the Lætas of Kent may be regarded. They were, as mentioned, of three classes, and were protected by Æthelbert’s laws by three degrees of fine or wergeld, in case any one of them should be killed—the higher the class, the higher the fine. The name Lætas may have been used to denote freemen of this early time, as the name Læti was on the Continent. In the early laws of Scandinavia we read of three classes of men who had obtained their freedom—i.e., who had become freedmen—and they also were protected by fines or wergelds in the same proportion as those connected with the Lætas of Kent—viz., 80, 60, and 40 ores of silver. The highest class of these was the man whose great-grandfather had been also a freedman, called in Scandinavia a leysing. As the evidence concerning the Jutes connects them with Scandinavia, this system of classing the freemen or freedmen of Kent may have been a Northern custom introduced into that part of England by them. The people so classed may therefore have been in part introduced by the Jutes, and in part have been descendants of the older Teutonic settlers introduced into Britain by the Romans, and for administrative purposes classed under this system.

That Frisians were largely represented among the settlers in Kent is generally allowed. The traces of Frisians in Kent, as elsewhere, may be looked for under the tribal designations by which people of that race were known, or called themselves. Bede mentions the Hunni as one of the tribes from which the people of England in his time were known to have descended, and these can be identified with the Frisian tribe known as Hunsings. The name Hunesbiorge occurs in a Kentish charter, and Honinberg Hundred is mentioned in Domesday Book. Brocmen and Chaucians, and other Frisians of tribal