'The ecclesiastical law says that no son is to have the patrimony but the eldest born to the father by the married wife: the law of Howell, however, adjudges it to the youngest son as well as to the oldest, [i.e. all the sons] and decides that sin of the father or his illegal act is not to be brought against a son as to his patrimony.' [305]
And so tenaciously was this tribal rule adhered to that even Edward I., after his conquest of Wales, was obliged for the sake of peace to concede its continuance to the Welsh, insisting only that none but lawful sons should share in the inheritance.[306]
The fixing of the gwestva dues, and their commutation into the tunc pound from every free trev, may well have been one of the emendations needful to bring the Welsh laws into correspondence with the 'law of the Emperor,' if it was not indeed the result of direct Roman rule, under which the chiefs paid a fixed tributum to the Roman State, possibly founded on the tribal food-rent.[307] [p235]
Early exactions and license on the part of the chiefs.
The special Welsh laws which relieve the free trevs of 'family land' from being under the maer (or villicus) and canchellor, and from kylch (or progress), and from dovraeth (or having the king's officers quartered upon them), and even limit the right of the maer and canchellor to quarter on the taeogs to three times a year with three followers, and their share in the royal dues from the taeogs to one-third of the dawnbwyds,[308] look very much like restrictions of old and oppressive customs resembling those prevalent in Ireland in later times, made with the intention of bringing the tribesmen and even the taeogs within the protection of rules similar to those in the Theodosian Code protecting the coloni on Roman estates.
The probability, therefore, is that the picture drawn by Sir John Davies of the lawless exactions of the Irish chieftain from the tribesmen of his sept would apply also to early Welsh and British chieftains before the influence of Christianity and later Roman law, through the Church, had restrained their harshness, and limited their originally wild and lawless exactions from the tribesmen. The legends of the Liber Landavensis contain stories of as wild and unbridled license and cruelty on the part of Welsh chieftains as are recorded in the ancient stories of the Irish tribes. And Cæsar records that the chiefs of Gallic tribes had so oppressively exacted their dues (probably food-rents), that they had reduced the smaller people almost into the condition of slaves. [p236]
The close resemblance of the Welsh system of clustering the homesteads and trevs in groups of four and twelve or sixteen, to that prevalent in Ireland, points to the common origin of both. It confirms the inference that both in Wales and in Ireland this curious practice found its raison d'être in a stage of tribal life when the families of free tribesmen did not as yet always occupy the same tyddyn, but were shifted from one to another whenever the dying out of a family rendered needful a redistribution to ensure the fair and equal division of the tribal lands among the tribesmen, 'according to their antiquity' and their rank under the tribal rules.
Redivisions and shifting of holdings.
This occasional shifting of tribal occupation within the tribe-land was still going on in Ireland under the eyes of Sir John Davies, and it seems to have survived the Roman rule in Wales, though it was there probably confined within very narrow limits.
It seems, however, to have been itself a survival of the originally more or less nomad habits of pastoral tribes.