This is a point of importance, because it goes far to show that the whole of the land of the alod was terra Salica, and protected by the saving clause from participation by females. The use of the word land alone in Codex 1 forbids our thinking that part of the land of the alod was terra Salica and the rest not terra Salica.[113] And this consideration seems to show that to import into the clause any explanation of the term derived from the word Sala, so as to confine its meaning to the ‘Haus und Hofland’ or the ‘Väterliches Wohnhaus,’ as Amira[114] and Lamprecht[115] would do, would be misleading. The homestead of the chief of a tribal family holding, on terra Salica, may, like the Roman villa, have passed by various and even natural stages into the ‘Herrengut,’ or ‘terra indominicata’ of later manorial phraseology, and the term terra Salica may have clung, as it were, to it. But to reason backwards to the Lex Salica from the instances of its later use, given by Guérard in his sections on the subject, seems in this case, if I may venture to say so, to be a reversal of the right order of inference. Lamprecht carefully guards himself against the view that the terra Salica of the Lex was as yet a ‘Herrengut,’ and Guérard, in his careful sections on the subject, admits three stages in the evolution of the terra Salica: (1) ‘l’enceinte dépendant de la maison du Germain;’ (2) ‘la terre du manse seigneurial;’ (3) ‘simplement la terre possédée en propre, quelquefois donnée en tenure.’[116]
This may in some sense fairly represent the line of evolution subsequently followed, and I have long ago recognised the embryo manor in the ‘Germania’ of Tacitus; but, for our present purpose, this does not seem to help to an understanding of the term as used in the Lex Salica.
When all the Codices are taken together into account, terra Salica seems to include the whole of the land, or landed rights, of the alod. From the whole, and not only the chief homestead, the succession of females is excluded, and it is the whole, and not the chief homestead only, which is to be divided between the nepotes and pronepotes of the deceased tribesman.
Approaching the Lex Salica, as we are doing, from a tribal point of view, we seem to get upon quite other and simpler ground.
Terra Salica was land held under the rules of the Lex Salica and subject ultimately to division per capita between great-grandchildren.
The emphasis laid in the Lex Salica upon the distinction in social status between persons ‘living under the Lex Salica’ and those living under Roman law suggests that land held under the Lex Salica was not held under the same rules as those under which the ‘Romanus possessor’ held his ‘res propria.’ It would seem natural, then, that terra Salica should be land held under Salic custom as opposed to land held under Roman law. And if this be the simple rendering of the term terra Salica in the Lex, then returning to the likeness of the Salic ‘alod’ to the Cymric family holding some likeness might be expected in the rules of succession to the land of the alod when compared with the Cymric rules of succession to the ‘tir gweliauc’ or family land of the gwely.
We have seen that in the gwely the descendants of a common great-grandfather were kept together as a family group till, after internal divisions between brothers and then between cousins, there was at last equal division of landed rights between second cousins, i.e. great-grandsons of the original head of the gwely. The fact of this right of redivision at last between great-grandchildren was apparently what held the family group together till the third generation.
The last clause of the ‘de alodis,’ even as it stands in Codex 1, coincides with Cymric custom in so far as it excludes females from landed rights and confines inheritance in the land of the alod in the first instance to sons ‘… qui fratres fuerint.’
And when at last later Codices call the land of the alod terra Salica, and the addition in Codex 10 is taken into account, the evidence becomes very strong indeed that under Salic custom the land of the alod or terra Salica was held as a family holding, and, like the land of the gwely, divisible, first between sons, then between grandsons, and at last between great-grandsons.