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

IV. THE FISCAL UNIT FOR THE PURPOSE OF FOOD-RENTS TO THE CHIEFTAINS.

The geographical unit for food rents.

The structure of tribal society in Wales is one thing. The practical working of its rules is another. Until we can to some extent realise its methods and see how its results could be worked out in everyday life, it must remain to some extent vague and mysterious. The nearer we get to its core, the greater its value as an instrument in further research.

We cannot, therefore, afford to disregard any hints that the Codes and surveys may give us, attention to which would help us to realise its methods or ways of working.

Districts called villatæ.

The Denbigh Extent, as already said, enables us to realise that, on the English conquest, the lordship of Denbigh was divided into grazing districts which had become the units of tribal food-rents, and which were adopted for purposes of future taxation. These districts were called by the scribes villatæ, and were occupied by gwelys of tribesmen and sometimes also by gwelys of non-tribesmen. Their homesteads or huts were occupied in severalty. Their grazing rights were undivided common rights, and within each gwely the rights of families and individuals were also undivided common rights.

Further, the Denbigh Extent shows how easy it was to shift the whole body of tribesmen of this or that gwely, with its herds, from one district to another, according to convenience or the needs of population, without disturbing the complex rights within the gwely. The families and individuals carried their rights, inter se, with them wherever they and their herds might go, and were liable to pay the dues required from whatever villata for the time being might be occupied by them.

Even the homesteads of the tribesmen seem to have been temporary, in the light of the description given by Giraldus Cambrensis. They could carry their hearth-stones with them wherever they went, so that the result seems to be that the groups of kindreds could always have been easily shifted about, as they were in fact after the English conquest, from one district or ‘villata’ to another. The geographical divisions thus became the permanent fiscal units in tribal arrangements. Both in the surveys and in the Codes we find the villata or district, and not the family group, the fixed unit for tribal food-rents to the chieftain, and for taxation after the English conquest.

The ‘tref’ or ‘maenol’ paying the ‘tunc pound.’

The surveys so far agree with the Codes. The villata of the surveys was the taxable unit, and in some cases still paid the tunc pound (or 20s.) in lieu of the chieftain’s food-rents. In other cases escheats and other causes had varied the amount. In the Codes of South Wales the unit for the tunc pound was the tref, and in the Venedotian Code of North Wales the maenol of four trefs.

Now, as in the surveys the family groups or gwelys were located so as to occupy sometimes several villatæ, and sometimes undivided shares in villatæ along with others, so, if we may take the villata of the surveys as equivalent to the tref or maenol of the Codes, we must expect to find that the kindreds of tribesmen at the period of the Codes were scattered in the same way over the trefs and maenols. And, as the maenol was a group of trefs, the tref is the unit of tribal occupation as to which a clear understanding is most necessary. In this, however, we may be, after all, only partly successful.

The word tref, though generally used for a homestead or hamlet, seems from its other meanings to involve the idea of a group.

The tref and its ‘randirs.’

There were cases in which a disputed matter of fact had to be established upon the evidence of men of the gorvotref, i.e. by men of the groups outside the tref in which the question in dispute arose.[30] And this gorvotref was not merely the next adjoining tref or trefs, but it consisted of those randirs or divisions of neighbouring trefs of uchelwrs, or tribesmen, whose boundaries touched the tref in which the disputed facts arose. Neighbouring randirs of taeog trefs, i.e. the trefs of non-tribesmen, were excluded, presumably because the testimony of taeogs in matters relating to tribesmen was not relied on. But this compound of the word tref implies that its general sense was a group of homesteads. That, in general, trefs had defined boundaries, is clear from the fact that it was an offence to break them, and this applied also to the randirs or divisions of the tref.[31]

The trefgordd of one herd and one plough.

Speaking, then, of the group generally known as a tref, we must regard it, not only as a taxable area, but also as the natural group known everywhere as a trefgordd, i.e. the natural group of the homesteads of relatives or neighbours acting together as a single community as regards their cattle and their ploughing.

The typical lawful trefgordd is thus described:—

This is the complement of a lawful trefgordd: nine houses and one plough and one oven (odyn) and one churn (gordd) and one cat and one cock and one bull and one herdsman.[32]

There is another passage which mentions the nine buildings in the tref.

These persons do not forfeit life.…

The necessitous for the theft of food after he has traversed three trevs, and nine houses in each trev, without obtaining a gift though asked for.[33]

So, in case of fire from negligence in a tref, the holder of the house in which it arose was to pay for the damage to the next houses on each side if they took fire.[34] And again no indemnity was to be paid to the owners in a trefgordd for damages from the fire of a smithy if covered with shingles or tiles or sods, nor from the fire of a bath, provided always that the smithy and the bath were at least seven fathoms from the other houses in the trefgordd.[35]

Not always of one gwely only.

The description above quoted of the normal trefgordd suggests that the herd under the one herdsman did not belong to one person or homestead, but to many; and so far it seems to be consistent with the surveys which represent the villatæ as occupied by the cattle of several family groups who had grazing rights therein.

And this, too, accords with what the Denbigh Extent tells us of the individual tribesmen, viz. that only some of them had homesteads. So-and-so ‘habet domum’ or ‘non habet domum.’[36] The young tribesman with his da thus may have joined in a common homestead with some one else—probably with his parents or near relatives.

Distinguishing, then, the tref as a taxable area from the trefgordd, and still confining attention to the trefgordd as a cluster of homesteads united for the practical purpose of occupation, let us recur to the things which bound the trefgordd into one group, viz. the one plough, the one oven, the one churn, the one bull, and the one herdsman.

Here are the two elements combined of pastoral and agricultural co-operation, and the trefgordd is the local and physical unit of this co-operation.

The unit of co-operative dairy farming. The common herdsman and his dog.

Taking first the pastoral element, the trefgordd was a working unit of co-operative dairy-farming. The cattle of several households or individuals were put together in a common herd with a common bull and under the care of a common herdsman (bugeil) and his dog. It may be regarded as a group of the homesteads of the persons in charge of such a herd, and the tribesmen of a gwely may have cattle in the herds of more than one trefgordd.

Three things were ‘ornamental’ to a trefgordd, ‘a book, a teacher versed in song, and a smith (gov) in his smithy;’ but a trefgordd herdsman was an ‘indispensable’ of the hendrev,[37] and, when engaged with his herd in summer on the mountain, his ‘three indispensables’ were ‘a bothy, his herdsman’s dog, and a knife;’ and the three indispensables of his bothy were a roof-tree, roof-supporting forks, and wattling, and he was at liberty to cut them in any wild wood he pleased.[38]

So far, then, as the pastoral element was concerned, the trefgordd was occupied by a little group of tribesmen engaged in dairy-farming having charge of cattle in a common herd, with a common bull, and under the care of a common herdsman and his dog.

The herd of 24 kine.

Custom, grown out of traditional experience of what a single herdsman and his dog could manage, had determined, it seems, the size of the normal herd. Thus in the Gwentian Code[39] we are told that ‘a legal herd of cattle is 24 kine.’ And custom tenaciously adhered to tribal rules in such matters.

Thus in the Denbigh Extent it is mentioned that the whole villata of Arquedelok was in manu domini by reason of escheats and exchanges, and that a portion of it was let ad firmam to nine firmarii, each of whom held for a term of years 31 acres, with one bull and 24 cows, paying per annum 73s. 4d., and rendering to the lord at the end of his term the said bull and cows or their price, together with the land and a house built thereon.[40] Here, even in a case in which Henry de Lacy was introducing into Wales holdings and herds in severalty, and very possibly introducing English tenants, he adhered to the Welsh tribal rule of the one bull and 24 cows to the herd. So also in the survey of St. David’s, under the head Glaston in Breconshire, the number 24 of grossa animalia is spoken of as the usual number ab antiqua consuetudine, and in the arrangement of common pasture one great animal is said to count as equal to twelve sheep.

The normal herd of the trefgordd was then 24 cows, or their equivalent in bullocks and sheep.

During the summer months the herdsman living out on the mountains was responsible with his dog for the cattle of the trefgordd. And his dog was worth as much as a cow or an ox, if it was one that ‘will go before the herd in the morning and behind them in the evening, and make three turns round them in the night.’[41]

Having no cattle of his own in the herd, the herdsman’s testimony as to whose cattle were injured, and as to whose cattle had done the injury, was held, when such cases arose, to be sufficient to make the owner responsible, while as regards injuries done by the cattle of one trefgordd to those of another there was joint responsibility.[42] There is common sense in such rules to begin with, and then, having grown into custom, they become perpetuated when custom is codified.

The common churn.

The trefgordd possessed further a common churn. This implies that the milk of the cows was thrown altogether into this one churn as in Swiss mountain communes now. One of the dues from a taeog trev, i.e. a group of non-tribesmen, was a cheese made from a day’s milking of all the cows in the herd. So that we note in passing that the taeog-tref, i.e. of non-tribesmen, also had its herd and was in fact a trefgordd.[43]

In winter the cattle came down into the lowlands and grazed on the pastures near the tyddyns or homesteads of the tref, and as each of these had its corn and cattle-yard,[44] we may conclude that each owner penned in his own cattle at night during the winter months or joined with some other tribesmen who had a homestead in doing so. The rules as to the divisions of the tyddyns probably referred to these winter homesteads so held in quasi-severalty.

We need not dwell upon the common oven. Every hamlet in Brittany possesses its common oven to this day, often in the middle of the village green. Nor need we more than mention the common plough, to the team of which the tribesmen contributed oxen for the cyvar or common ploughing of the portion of the waste agreed upon for each year’s corn crop.

The trefgordd the unit for food rents. The tribesmen could be shifted about.

The attempt to realise what this practical unit—the trefgordd—was, will not be thrown away if it should help us to understand how easily it lent itself to the arrangement of the chieftain’s food-rents or tribute in after-times of taxation. Granted that some such system of trefgordds or clusters of trefgordds pretty generally prevailed, having grown up as a matter of convenience in a grazing community, it is obvious how easily it might become the unit of tribute or taxation. Just as in the Domesday Survey the number of ploughs affords such a unit, so in a tribal community a district might easily be fiscally estimated at so many herds, or so many churns, or so many ploughs. All these would mean so many trefgordds. And whatever the relations of the trefgordd to the villata of the surveys might be, and however much or often the actual residents, with their herds, might be shifted from one district to another, the district, as in the Denbigh Extent, would remain the permanent unit for payments.

The firma unius noctis. Afterwards commuted into money payments.

In the early stages of tribal life, when the chieftain of the tribe moved from one district to another and received his food-rents in the actual form of ‘the night’s entertainment,’ each customary place of encampment in his annual progress would become the centre at which the food-rents would be paid and services rendered for as many nights’ entertainment as his accustomed stay in the place. In later stages, when the chieftain’s dues were commuted into money, the ‘tunc pound’ in lieu of food-rents easily became, as we find it in the surveys, a charge on the district rather than on the shifting tribesmen and their herds.

And when the power of the chieftain had grown with time, and instead of ‘nights’ entertainments’ obtained in the primitive way by the actual movement of himself and his retinue from place to place, the food-rents or the tunc pounds in lieu of them were delivered at his palace, he would become the recipient of a regular revenue. And out of this revenue it would become easy for him to reward a follower or endow a church by the transfer of so many food-rents or tunc pounds in lieu of them, or the revenue from such and such a district, or of so many of its trefgordds, without disturbing the internal working of the system or the daily life of the tribesmen and their herds. When Beowulf returns to his chieftain after his exploit and is rewarded by the gift of a palace and so many ‘thousands,’ we naturally ask of what, and how it could be done. We may not be able to say off-hand what the unit was, but we get from the Welsh example some rough idea of what tribal tribute and income were, and how these could be readily gathered and transferred.