The tribal households shifted among the holdings.
This curious geometrical arrangement or classification of tyddyns and trevs, with an equal area of land to each, is at first sight entirely inconsistent with the division of the family land among the heirs of the holder, inasmuch as the great grandchildren when they divided the original family holding must, one would suppose, have held smaller shares than their great [p205] grandfather. And there is only one answer to this. It would have been so if the tribe, and the families composing it, were permanently fixed and settled on the same land, and pursuing a regular agriculture, with an increasing population within certain boundaries. But the Welsh were still a pastoral people, and, as we shall see when we come to examine the Irish tribal system, while the homesteads and land divisions were fixed, the occupants were shifted about by the chiefs from time to time, each sept, or clan, or family receiving at each rearrangement a certain number of tyddyns or homesteads, according to certain tribal rules of blood relationship of a very intricate character.
This permanence of the geographical divisions and homesteads, and shifting of the tribal households whenever occasion required it, was only possible with a pastoral and scanty population. Long before the fourteenth century the households were settled in their homesteads, geometrical regularity had ceased, and the land was divided and subdivided into irregular fractions. This is the state of things disclosed in the Record of Carnarvon. But in the tenth century, according to the Welsh laws, the old tribal rules were apparently still in force.
The clustering of households the distinctive mark of the tribal system.
Without pretending to have mastered all the details of these obscure tribal arrangements, the point to be noted is that the scattering of the tyddyns all over the country side, and the clustering of them by fours and sixteens, or twelves, into the group which was the unit paying the gwestva or tunc pound, and again into clusters of twelve or thirteen[260] under a [p206] maer, as the unit of civil jurisdiction, were obviously distinctive features arising from the tribal holding of land, and that the system was adopted apparently to facilitate the division of the land among the families in the tribe somewhat in the same way as in the open field system the division of the arable land by turf balks into actual erws facilitated the division of the ploughed land among the contributors to the plough team.
Bearing this in mind we may now turn back to the Domesday Survey, and compare its description of the land system of Gwent and Archenfield with the results obtained from the Welsh laws.
In order, however, to make this comparison the Welsh terms must be translated into Latin, otherwise it will be difficult to recognise the trev, and maer, and maenol, and gwestva in the Domesday description.
Latin equivalent of tribal words in the Domesday Survey.
The before-mentioned Latin version of the Dimetian Code, the MS. of which dates from the early thirteenth century, will do this for us.[261]
It translates trev, the unit of the tunc pound, by villa. It takes the Welsh word 'maenol' as equivalent to manor, and indeed it did resemble the Saxon and Norman manor in this, that it was the unit of the jurisdiction of each single steward or villicus of the chief. This officer was called in Welsh the maer, which was translated into the Latin præpositus. He did to some extent resemble the English præpositus, but he differed in this—that instead of being set over the 'trev' or 'villata' of a single manor, [p207] the Welsh maer was, as we have seen, set over a number of 'villas' or trevs—thirteen free trevs or seven taeog-trevs, in Gwent—each free trev of which rendered its 'tunc pound' or 'gwestva,' and each taeog or villein-trev its 'dawn-bwyd' of food.