We know how persistently the division among male heirs was adhered to in Wales and in Ireland under the custom of Gavelkind,[531] though of the peculiar right of the youngest son to the original homestead we have no clear trace in Ireland. Possibly St. Patrick was strong enough to reverse in this instance a strong tribal custom. But in Wales the succession of the youngest was, as we have seen, so deeply ingrained in the habits of the people that it was observed even among the _taeogs_. The elder sons received _tyddyns_ of their own in the _taeog trev_ in their father's lifetime, whilst the youngest son remained in his father's tyddyn, and on his death succeeded to it. The persistence in division among heirs and the right of the youngest were very likely therefore to linger as survivals of the tribal household. «Survival of this equal division and _the right of the youngest_.» Now it is well known that in the south-east of England, and especially in Kent, the custom of Gavelkind has continued to the present day, retaining the division among male heirs and historical traces of the right of the youngest son to the original homestead. In other districts of England and in many parts of Europe and Asia the division among heirs has passed away, but the right of the youngest--_Jüngsten-Recht_--has survived. Mr. Elton, in his '_Origins of English History_,' has carefully described the geographical distribution in Western Europe of the practice, not so much of _division among heirs_, as of the _right of the youngest_ to [p353] inherit the _original homestead_, the latter having survived in many districts where the other has not. «In Wales and S.E. England--the old 'Saxon shore.'» In England he finds the right of the youngest most prevalent in the south-east counties--in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey, in a ring of manors round London, and to a less extent in Essex and the East Anglian kingdom,--_i.e._ as Mr. Elton describes it, in a district about co-extensive with what in Roman times was known as the _Saxon shore_. A few examples occur in Hampshire, and there is a wide district where the right of the youngest survives in Somersetshire, which formed for so long a part of what the Saxons called '_Wealcyn_.'[532] Further, as the custom is found to apply to copyhold or semi-servile holdings, it would not be an impossible conjecture that previously existing original tribal households were, at some period, upon conquest, reduced into serfs, the division of the holdings among heirs being at the same time stopped, so as to keep the holdings in equal 'yokes,' or 'yard-lands,' thus leaving the right of the youngest as the only point of the pre-existing tribal custom permitted to survive. «Survival of the 'right of the youngest' on the Continent.»