Kingdom of Kent

The Kingdom of Kent was the Jutish kingdom of southeast England, lasting from the fifth or sixth century until Wessex swallowed it in the mid-ninth. After Rome left in 410, Angles, Saxons and Jutes all came, the last to Kent and Wight: Jutish settlers, perhaps invited as foederati mercenaries, built their realm in East Kent under the shadow of Francia across the straits. Kent's kings received Augustine's Gregorian mission at Canterbury in 597: Bede names Ethelbert, a Frankish wife's husband newly converted, the earliest surely attested English king and a bretwalda south of Humber, and Kent stood first among the seven Heptarchy kingdoms. Hengist and Horsa had landed at Ebbsfleet in 449 against the Picts before turning on Vortigern. Small and rich, Kent could not hold against greater powers: Mercia made it a sub-kingdom, Wessex absorbed it in the 800s, and by the early tenth century it was a county inside the new Kingdom of England.