The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

The previous study of the Welsh and Irish tribal system ought to help us to judge what they were.

In the first place we have clearly learned that in tracing the connexion of the tribal system with local names, the fixing of a particular personal name to a locality implies settlement. It implies not only a departure from the old nomadic habits on the part of the whole tribe, but also the absence within the territory of the tribe of those redistributions of the tribesmen among the homesteads—the shifting of families from one homestead to another—which prevailed apparently in Wales and certainly in Ireland to so late a date.

Following the parallel experience of the Irish and Welsh tribal system we may certainly conclude that in the early semi-nomadic and shifting tribal stage described by Cæsar the names of places, like those of the Irish townlands, would follow local peculiarities of wood or stream or plain, and that not until there was a permanent settlement of particular families in fixed abodes could personal names attach themselves to places, or suffixes be used which in themselves involve the idea of a fixed abode.

They are suggestive of the tribal household.

Then with regard to the nature of the tribal settlements which these local names with a patronymic [p351] suffix may represent, surely the actual evidence of the Welsh laws and the 'Record of Carnarvon,' as to what a tribal household was, must be far more likely to guide us to the truth than any theoretical view of the 'village community' under the German mark-system, or even actual examples of village communities existing under complex and totally different circumstances at the present time, valuable as such examples may be as evidence of how the descendants of tribesmen comport themselves after perhaps centuries of settlement on the same ground.

The joint holding of a family down to second cousins.

Now we have seen that the tribal household in Wales was the joint holding of the heirs of a common ancestor from the great-grandfather downwards, with redistributions within it to make equality, first between brothers, then between cousins, and finally between second cousins; the youngest son always retaining the original homestead in these divisions. The Weles, Gwelys, and Gavells of the 'Record of Carnarvon' were late examples of such holdings. They were named after the common ancestor and occupied by his heirs. Such holdings, so soon as there was fixed settlement in the homesteads, were obviously in the economic stage in which, according to German usage, the name of the original holders with the patronymic suffix might well become permanently attached to them.[530]

The division, the youngest retaining the family homestead.

We may then, following the Welsh example, fairly expect the distinctive marks of the tribal household to be joint holding for two or three generations, and then the ultimate division of the holding among male heirs, the youngest retaining the original ancestral homestead. [p352]

We know how persistently the division among male heirs was adhered to in Wales and in Ireland under the custom of Gavelkind,[531] though of the peculiar right of the youngest son to the original homestead we have no clear trace in Ireland. Possibly St. Patrick was strong enough to reverse in this instance a strong tribal custom. But in Wales the succession of the youngest was, as we have seen, so deeply ingrained in the habits of the people that it was observed even among the taeogs. The elder sons received tyddyns of their own in the taeog trev in their father's lifetime, whilst the youngest son remained in his father's tyddyn, and on his death succeeded to it.