It is well known that Kent held a peculiar place in the legal and economic history of medieval England, and that after the Conquest the custom of Kent was recognized in the king’s courts as the common law of the county. In Gloucestershire¹  and elsewhere, where they may once have existed in districts coinciding with administrative divisions, such customs had perished before the unifying advance of the common law—the law, that is to say, which was administered by the king’s courts, and was applicable to military tenements held of the Norman kings. Their survival in Kent was probably due to the advanced civilization of much of the county at the time of the Conquest, its favoured position as the highway to the Continent, and its importance strategically; conditions which led to the early formulation of custom, and induced self-consciousness strong enough to withstand the attacks of other legal and economic rules. In view of these interesting peculiarities of the county the Domesday description is disappointing. Notwithstanding a distinctive terminology and the so-called leges regis, the returns for Kent seem to belong, as a whole, to those of the south-eastern group of counties, and show no very clear evidences of differences which were really important. The survey of the county seems thus to furnish a good example of the tendency of the royal inquest to make existing local peculiarities, the consuetudo patriae, fit into a general mould, even at the expense of obscuring them, and to apply similar terms to differing conditions. In partial modification of this statement it should be remembered that ‘the custom of Kent’ was in some very small measure the result of later accretions, added after the Conquest to an original nucleus.²
   The form in which the returns of the county are entered in the Exchequer Domesday is a little confusing. The Survey opens with a description of Dover, followed by a statement of the leges regis of Kent and allied matters, compiled from a statement on which ‘the men of the four lests,’ namely the lests of East Kent, are agreed (concordant). The relation of this statement of the leges to that drawn up at Pennenden Heath will be considered later. The description of the lands of the canons of St. Martin of Dover follows, interrupted in the midst by the insertion of a description of Canterbury, but resumed again before the beginning of the main part of the Survey of the king’s lands and of the lands of the tenants in chief. The prominent and irregular position accorded to St. Martin may be due, Larking suggests,³ to peculiar favour extended by the commissioners to that foundation. Of
   ¹  Stat. of the Realm, i, p. 226.
   ²  Neilson, Custom and the Common Law in Kent. Harvard Law Rev. Feb. 1925, p. 482 et seq.
   ³  Larking, Domesday of Kent, p. 161.