Item if the woman of a carl be slain, the lord of the fee where he dwells shall have the kelchin and the vilein shall have his wife’s turhochret of the kelchin and her kyn shall have the cro and the galnes.
There are so many Gaelic words in this document that there can be little doubt that the turhochret[208] is one of them. It seems to have been the part of the kelchin allowed by the lord to go to the husband in respect of the insult to his wife—i.e. her share in the kelchin. Whatever it was, when the wife was slain, the husband retained it, while the lord took the rest of the kelchin, and the wife’s kin the cro and galnes of their slain kinswoman. The information given is scanty, but it is difficult to make this passage mean anything else.
The wife belonged to her own kindred.
One thing is made remarkably clear in this document: that the wife of the free tribesman did not among the Bretts and Scots pass upon marriage under the full potestas of her husband. On her murder, while it was an insult to him and he therefore could claim the kelchin, the cro and the galnes passed to her kin. The wife, therefore, in a very real sense belonged still to her own kindred.
These rules of tribal custom as regards marriage need no longer surprise us after what we have found elsewhere. They closely resemble in principle Cymric usage and are, after all, what the study of Beowulf prepared us to regard as by no means confined to the Celtic tribes.
IV. RECOGNITION OF THE FOURTH AND NINTH DEGREES OF KINDRED IN SCOTLAND.
In the foregoing sections no distinct reference has been made to the recognition of the fourth and ninth degrees of kindred. It would be misleading to pass from the Scottish evidence without allusion to the subject.
Strongly influenced as custom in Scotland must have been by both Cymric and Gaelic as well as Norse and Danish traditions, it would be strange if no trace were left in Scotland of so marked a feature of tribal policy.
The nine degrees of kindred.
It will be enough, however, to refer the reader to the interesting chapter on ‘The Kin’ in the second volume of Mr. Robertson’s ‘Scotland under her early Kings,’ in which he alludes to ‘the words in which the Northern St. Margaret is supposed to have formally renounced her kindred (“al my Kun I forsake to the nithe Kne”), and to the “nine degrees of kindred” within which all connected with the Earl of Fife might claim the privileges of the Clan Mac Duff.