The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

II. THE WELSH LAND SYSTEM IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

There is no reason why, in trying to learn the nature of the Welsh land system, the method followed throughout, of proceeding backwards from the known to the unknown, should not be followed.

Open-field system in Wales.

It has already been shown that such arable fields as there are in Wales, like the Saxon arable fields, were open fields. They were shown to be divided by turf balks, two furrows wide,[214] into strips called erws—representing a day's work in ploughing. The Welsh laws were also found to supply the simplest and clearest solution given anywhere of the reason of the scattering of the strips in the holdings, as well as of the relations of the grades of holdings to the number of oxen contributed by the holders to the common plough team of eight oxen.

In fact, the Welsh codes clearly prove that, as regards arable husbandry, the open field system was the system prevalent throughout all the three districts of Wales. [p187]

The Welsh mainly pastoral.

But partly from the mountainous nature of the country, and partly from the peculiar stage of economic development through which the Welsh were passing, long after the Norman Conquest they were still a pastoral people. Cattle rather than corn claimed the first consideration, and ruled their habits; and hence the Welsh land system, even in later times, was very different from that of the Saxons.

In fact, the two land systems, though both using an open-field husbandry, were in their main features radically distinct. In those parts of Wales which were unconquered, and therefore uncivilised, till the conquest of Edward I., we look in vain in the early surveys for the manor or estate with the village community in villenage upon it.

No manors or villages.

The Welsh system was not manorial. Its unit was not a village community on a lord's estate.

Scattered green timber houses.

As late as the twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis[215] described the houses of the Welsh as not built either in towns or even in villages, but as scattered along the edges of the woods. To his eye they seemed mere huts made of boughs of trees twisted together, easily constructed, and lasting scarcely more than a season. They consisted of one room, and the whole family, guests and all, slept on rushes laid along the wall, with their feet to the fire, the smoke of which found its way through a hole in the roof.[216] The Welsh, in fact, being a pastoral people, had two sets of homesteads. In summer their herds fed on the higher ranges of the hills, and in winter in the valleys. So they themselves, following their cattle, had separate [p188] huts for summer and for winter use, as was also the custom in the Highlands of Scotland, and is still the case in the higher Alpine valleys. Giraldus Cambrensis describes the greater part of the land as in pasture and very little as arable; and accordingly the food of the Welsh he describes, just as Cæsar had described it eleven centuries earlier, as being chiefly the produce of their herds—milk, cheese and butter, and flesh in larger proportions than bread.[217] The latter was mostly of oats.

Welsh ploughing.

The Welsh ploughed for their oats in March and April, and for wheat in summer and winter, yoking to their ploughs seldom fewer than four oxen; and he mentions as a peculiarity that the driver walked backward in front of the oxen, as we found was the custom in Scotland.[218]

Love of war.

Genealogies.

Another marked peculiarity of the Welsh was their hereditary liking and universal training for warlike enterprise. They were soldiers as well as herdsmen; even husbandmen eagerly rushed to arms from the plough.[219] Long settlement and the law of division of labour had not yet brought about the separation of the military from the agricultural population of Wales even so late as the twelfth century. And here we come upon traces of their old tribal economy. For the facts that they had not yet attained to settled villages and townships, that they had not yet passed from the pastoral to the agricultural stage, that they were still craving after warfare and wild enterprise—all [p189] these are traces of tribal habits still remaining. And a still clearer mark of the same thing was the stress they laid upon their genealogy. Even the common people (he says) keep their genealogies, and can not only readily recount the names of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but even refer back to the sixth or seventh generation, or beyond them, in this manner: Rhys, son of Gruffydh, son of Rhys, son of Theodor, son of Eineon, son of Owen, son of Howel, son of Cadelh, son of Roderic Mawr, and so on.[220]

Survivals of the tribal system.

Thus in the twelfth century there were in Wales distinct survivals of a tribal economy. Instead of a system like the Saxons, of village communities and townships, the Welsh system was evidently a tribal system in the later stages of gradual disintegration, tenaciously preserving within it arrangements and customs pointing back to a period when its rules had been in full force.

But the Welsh codes must be further examined before the significance of the Domesday entries can be fully appreciated.