The chieftain's hall is twice the size and value of the free tribesman's, and the free tribesman's is twice [p241] that of the taeog. But the plan is the same. They are all built with similar green timber forks and roof-tree and wattle,[319] with the fireplace in the nave and the rush beds in the aisles. One might almost conjecture that as the tabernacle was the type which grew into Solomon's temple, so the tribal house built of green timber and wattle, with its high nave and lower aisles, when imitated in stone, grew into the Gothic cathedral. Certainly the Gothic cathedral, simplified and reduced in size and materials to a rough and rapidly erected structure of green timber and wattle, would give no bad idea of the tribal house of Wales or Ireland. It has been noticed in a former chapter that the Bishop of Durham had his episcopal bothy, or hunting hall, erected for him every year by his villeins, in the forest, as late as the time of the Boldon Book. This also was possibly a survival of the tribal house.[320]
The tribal household.
In this tribal house the undivided household of free tribesmen, comprising several generations down to the great-grandchildren of a common ancestor, lived together; and, as already mentioned, even the structure of the house was typical of the tribal family arrangement.
In the aisles were the gwelys of rushes, and the whole household was bound as it were together in one gwellygord. The gwelys were divided by the [p242] central columns, or gavaels (Welsh for 'fork'), into four separate divisions; so there were four gavaels in a trev, and four randirs in a gavael. And so in after times, long after the tribal life was broken up, the original holding of an ancient tribesman became divided in the hands of his descendants into gavells and gwelys, or weles.[321]
Another point has been noticed. In the old times, when the tribesmen shifted about from place to place, their personal names by necessity could not be given to the places or tyddyns they lived in. The local names in a country where the tribal system prevailed were taken from natural characteristics—the streams, the woods, the hills, which marked the site. This was the case, for instance, with the townlands and tates of Ireland. Most of them bear witness, as we have seen, by their impersonal names, to the shifting and inconstant tenancy of successive tribesmen.[322]
It was probably not till the tribes became stationary, and, after many generations, the same families became permanent holders of the same homesteads, that the Welsh gwelys and gavells became permanent family possessions, known by the personal name of their occupants, as we find them in the extents of the fourteenth century.[323]
The tribal blood-money.
Another characteristic of the tribal system in its early stages was the purely natural and tribal character of the system of blood-money, answering to the [p243] Wergelt of the Germans. It was not an artificial bundling together of persons in tens or tithings, like the later Saxon and Norman system of frankpledge, but strictly ruled by actual family relationship. The murderer of a man, or his relations of a certain degree, and in a certain order and proportion, according to their nearness of blood, owed the fixed amount of blood-money to the family of the murdered person, who shared it in the same order and proportions on their side.[324] The same principle held good for insults and injuries, between not only individuals, but tribes. For an insult done by the tribesman of another tribe to a chief, the latter could claim one hundred cows for every cantrev in his dominion (i.e. a cow for every trev), and a golden rod.[325]
Tenacity of tribal habits.
The tribesmen and the tribes were thus bound together by the closest ties, all springing, in the first instance, from their common blood-relationship. As this ruled the extent of their liability one for another, so it fixed both the nearness of the neighbourhood of their tyddyns, and the closeness of the relationships of their common life. And these ties were so close, and the rules of the system so firmly fixed by custom and by tribal instinct, that Roman or Saxon conquest, and centuries of Christian influence, while they modified and hardened it in some points, and stopped its actual nomadic tendencies, left its main features and spirit, in Ireland and Wales and Western Scotland, unbroken. It would seem that tribal life might well go on repeating itself, generation after generation, for a thousand years, with little variation, without [p244] really passing out of its early stages, unless in the meantime some uncontrollable force from outside of it should break its strength and force its life into other grooves.