Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law / Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'

by Frederic Seebohm

I. THE UNIT OF CYMRIC TRIBAL SOCIETY.

The next step in this inquiry will be to give a brief summary of the results of the evidence contained in the volume on the ‘Tribal System in Wales,’ adding at the same time such further details as may be useful in helping us to realise the methods by which tribal custom worked itself out in practice.[20]

The Cymric unit of landholding was the gwely.

The chief fact revealed by the examination of the Extents and Surveys of different parts of Wales made after the English conquest, taken together with the Cymric Codes, was that the unit of society and of land-occupation under Cymric tribal custom was not the individual, and not the immediate family, but the group of kindred known as the ‘Wele’ or ‘Gwely.’

Such and such a Villata or District is described in the surveys as in the occupation of the gwelys of so and so, the Latin word used for gwely being ‘lectus’ or bed.

The gwely was a family group of a great-grandfather and his descendants.

The form of society thus revealed was patriarchal in the sense that the common ancestor (generally conceived to be the great-grandfather) during his life, and even after his death, was regarded as the head of the gwely or group of his descendants for three generations. In his name as its head this family group occupied land and had grazing rights over certain districts, sometimes alone, more often in common with other family groups.

As to what is meant by land ownership in the full modern sense, the question may not have arisen, or it might have come in gradually sooner or later, as agriculture came more and more into prominence. What property, strictly speaking, the tribesmen owned consisted mainly of herds of cattle.

Naturally, therefore, what rights over land they may have had were mainly rights of occupation and grazing in certain districts for their herds. Their agriculture was secondary, and consisted of the right to plough up such portions of the waste or common pasture as year by year might be required for their corn crop. All that need be said at this moment about their agriculture is that it was an open field husbandry, the result of the co-ploughing of a common plough-team normally of 8 oxen, the joint contribution of several tribesmen.

The young tribesman is dependent on the chief, not on his father. The tribesmen recover their da or cattle from him as their chief for their maintenance.

Returning to the gwely, we find that when a child was born into it, whether boy or girl, it was formally acknowledged by the kindred. It remained ‘at the father’s platter’ to a certain age (generally 14), and then the father ceased to be responsible. The boy at 14 became the ‘man and kin’ of the chieftain of the family group, or it might be of the higher kindred embracing several of the gwelys. From that moment the boy obtained by ‘kin and descent’ a tribesman’s right of maintenance. That is to say, he received from the chieftain his da, probably in the form of an allotment of cattle,[21] and with it the right to join in the co-ploughing of the waste. He became thus a tribesman on his own hook, apart from his father. So that the unit of society was not simply the family in the modern sense of a parent and his children, but the wider kindred of the gwely or the group of related gwelys headed by the chieftain who provided the da.