of Gothic settlement is supported by another custom which also existed there, that of freedom from distraint.[1] It has been mentioned that this was incidental to gavelkind in Kent. The custom in that county, as already stated, was not merely partition among all the sons equally, but comprised several subsidiary privileges of great interest. Freedom from distress for debts was one, and this can be traced to the laws of the ancient Goths.[2] By the records of the Court of King’s Bench, Hiliary Term 20 Edward III., it is shown that the lands within the Fee of Pickering were partible among the males,[3] and Pickering also had freedom from distraint. The old name of Goathland, anciently written Gothland, still survives on the north of Pickering Moor, and was perhaps a boundary name. It is marked Gothland on an old map of Pickering of the seventeenth century, published in the first volume of the North Riding Record Society. In the case of Pickering we thus have three circumstances pointing to a settlement of Goths—viz., the custom of partible inheritance, freedom from the general law of distress, and the survival of the name Gothland. Early records, both English and those of kindred nations, point to a time when distress was almost the universal form of civil remedy. The laws of the Visigoths, however, prohibited this remedy, and in Kent, in London, and in Pickering the people enjoyed by custom freedom from it in the recovery of debts or rents. They were probably all of Gothic descent; and here reference may be made to what has been said of the -by places which abound in the East Riding. These are Gothic as well as Danish, and some of them in Yorkshire may have been derived from settlers who were Goths.
The earliest of all the settlements in the northern counties, if we may trust the account concerning it, was
