excellent example of it has appeared, viz. in the _Poems of Rural
Life, in the Dorset Dialect_, by William Barnes.




CHAPTER VII

THE SOUTHERN DIALECT OF KENT


Though the Kentish dialect properly belongs to Southern English,
from its position to the south of the Thames, yet it shows certain
peculiarities which make it desirable to consider it apart from the
rest.

In Beda's _Ecclesiastical History_, Bk I, ch. 15, he says of the
Teutonic invaders: "Those who came over were of the three most
powerful nations of Germany--Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes
are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those
also in the province of the West-Saxons who are to this day called
Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight"; a remark which obviously
implies the southern part of Hampshire. This suggests that the speech
of Kent, from the very first, had peculiarities of its own. Dr Sweet,
in his _Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, Archaic and Dialectal_, gives five
very brief Kentish charters of the seventh and eighth centuries, but
the texts are in Latin, and only the names of persons and places
appear in Kentish forms. In the ninth century, however, there are
seven Kentish charters, of a fuller description, from the year 805 to
837. In one of these, dated 835, a few lines occur that may be quoted: