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.