Letters

A Jute or any old Saxon? Writers in so many publications since the late 1970s refer to the occupants of post-Roman Cantium/Kent only as Saxons. The Jutish royal line and the early Kingdom of Kent have been subsumed into the less distinctive people of much of South-East England. Is there a good reason for this new vagueness, or is it just that too much history writing now seeks to be valid for all the 'South-East', the term usually given to Sussex/Surrey/Kent and perhaps Essex?

Is KP Witney's 'The Jutish Forest' to be renamed? He chose his title accurately for the unique and important Society of lathe, drove and den which he described so well. By Norman times the laws of gavelkind, not applicable in Sussex or Surrey, were still obviously different enough to impress or confuse the conqueror. Perhaps today's author, blessed with increasing knowledge, yet hoping to avoid the riddle of Faesten Die, chooses to write of Kent after the Romans left it as all Saxon country. It would, though, be just as defensible to call all Kent's people Jutes.

I am writing a history of Kent's woodland. May I refer to those people living east of Dartford in the 5th - 7th centuries as Jutes, please, or would that nowadays be frowned upon?

Geoffrey Roberts