The exceptional conditions of the Kentish district were continued by its being the earliest to come into close contact with the court of the Merovingian Franks, and with ecclesiastical influences from Rome. The mission of St. Augustine resulted in the codification of Kentish custom into written laws a century earlier than the date of the earliest laws of Wessex. The peculiar character of Kentish custom may have been further maintained by the partial isolation of Kent. The kingdom of the Kentish kings, though lessened in Ethelbert’s time by the encroachment of Wessex, had maintained its independence of both the Northumbrian and Mercian supremacy or Bretwaldorship. Apart from any original difference in custom between Jutish and other tribes this isolation naturally produced divergence in some respects from the customs of the rest of Anglo-Saxon England and may perhaps partly explain why the Laws of the Kentish Kings came to be included in only one of the early collections of Anglo-Saxon laws. Further, when we approach the subject of Kentish wergelds we do so with the direct warning, already alluded to, of the writer of the so-called Laws of Henry I., that we shall find them differing greatly from those of Wessex. [Sidenote: Wergelds said to differ from those of Wessex and Mercia.] This we have said according to our law and custom, but the difference of wergeld is great in Kent, _villanorum et baronum_. Moreover, in after times Kentish custom differed from that of other parts of England in the matter of succession. The custom of Gavelkind prevailed in Kent. And among the statutes after the Norman Conquest there is an undated statement setting forth peculiar customs of Kent in matters where they differed from those of the rest of the kingdom. Some of these differences may have been of later origin, but a comparison of the laws themselves with other Anglo-Saxon laws is conclusive upon the point that important differences always existed and, what is more, were recognised as existing. Although the Kentish laws are not included with other Anglo-Saxon laws in any manuscript but that of Rochester, yet they were known to King Alfred. He mentioned them in the proem to his laws as well as the Mercian laws as among those which he had before him in framing his own. Moreover, we have seen that at the time of the Danish invasion certain differences between the Kentish and other laws were known and noted correctly in the fragment ‘Of Grith and of Mund.’