Continental society included everywhere, as we have seen, such classes as the Roman liti and liberti composed of strangers and freedmen who had not so far risen in the social scale as to have fully recognised rights of inheritance and whose wergeld never was of the same amount as that of the full freeman. It is in connection with such classes that the tribal distinction of blood came in. If for the full freeman we were to substitute the word tribesman, with all the background of hyndens of kinsmen to fight and to swear for him involved in the term, then from the same point of view we must expect to find in Kent, as everywhere else, strangers in blood below the tribesmen, like the aillts and alltuds and taeogs of the Cymric Codes, the fuidhirs of the Brehon Laws, if not the liberti and liti of the Gallo-Romans, or, perhaps still more nearly to the point, the leysing classes of the Norse Laws.
The Kentish freedman and læt resembled the Norse leysing.
We have already found incidental mention of the Kentish freedman. He cannot after enfranchisement have been classed as an esne or a theow. There would seem to be no other class mentioned to which he could belong, unless it might be that of the læts of Ethelbert’s Laws.
It is worth while, therefore, to recur to the single clause in Ethelbert’s Laws already quoted respecting the læts and to examine it more closely. Within the compass of its few words there may perhaps be found evidence connecting the status of the Kentish læt with what we have learned of the status and conditions of the Norse leysing.
26. If a man slay a læt of the best class, let him pay 80 scillings; if one of the second class, let him pay 60 scillings; of the third, let him pay 40 scillings.
The clause does not mention to whom the payments are to be made, whether to the læt himself or, as in the case of the freedman, to his late owner or lord. But the payments are not called leodgelds as are the wergelds of freemen.
Three classes in both cases.
Looking to the payments themselves they are graduated for three classes of læts. There were also, under Norse custom, three classes of leysings gradually growing by successive steps towards a higher grade of freedom as kindreds grew up around them and became more and more nearly perfect till at last the ninth generation from the first freedman became fully free. Why may not the three grades of Kentish læts have been doing the same?
Let us compare the amounts of the payments for the slaying of the three classes of Kentish læts with those for the three classes of Norse leysings.
We have seen over and over again that the Kentish scilling regarded as twenty sceatts was an ore or a Roman ounce of silver. Therefore the Kentish payments, stated in ounces of silver, were as follows:—