The tribe was composed of households of free Welshmen, all blood relations; and the homesteads of these households were scattered about on the country side, as they were found to be in the time of Giraldus Cambrensis. They seem to have been grouped into artificial clusters mainly, as we shall see, for purposes of tribute or legal jurisdiction. [p191]
Taeogs without tribal blood.
But all the inhabitants of Wales were not members of the tribes. Besides the households of tribesmen of blood relations and pure descent, there were hanging on to the tribes or their chiefs, and under the overlordship of the latter, or sometimes of tribesmen, strangers in blood who were not free Welshmen; also Welshmen illegitimately born, or degraded for crime. And these classes, being without tribal or family rights, were placed in groups of households and homesteads by themselves. If there were any approach to the Saxon village community in villenage upon a lord's estate under Welsh arrangements, it was to be found in this subordinate class, who were not Welshmen, and had no rights of kindred, and were known as aillts and taeogs of the chief on whose land they were settled. Further, as there was this marked distinction between tribesmen and non-tribesmen, so also there was a marked and essential distinction between the free tribe land occupied by the families of free Welsh tribesmen, called 'tir gwelyawg,' or family land, and the 'caeth land' or bond land of the taeogs and aillts, which latter was also called 'tir-cyfrif' or register land, and sometimes 'tir-kyllydus' or geldable land (gafol-land?).[222]
The main significance of the Welsh system, both as regards individual rights and land usages, turns [p192] on this distinction between the two different classes of persons and the two different kinds of land occupied by them. They will require separate examination.
Let us first take the free tribesmen ('Uchelwyrs' or 'Breyrs') and their 'family land.'
The free tribesmen.
If the professed triads of Dyvnwal Moelmud may be taken to represent, as they claim to do, the condition of things in earlier centuries, the essential to membership in the cenedl, or tribe, was birth within it of Welsh parents.
Free-born Welshmen were 'tied' together in a 'social state' by the three ties of—
- (1) Common defence (cyvnawdd).
- (2) Common tillage (cyvar).
- (3) Common law (chyvraith).[223]
Every free Welshman was entitled to three things:—