Further, the Denbigh Extent shows how easy it was to shift the whole body of tribesmen of this or that gwely, with its herds, from one district to another, according to convenience or the needs of population, without disturbing the complex rights within the gwely. The families and individuals carried their rights, inter se, with them wherever they and their herds might go, and were liable to pay the dues required from whatever villata for the time being might be occupied by them.
Even the homesteads of the tribesmen seem to have been temporary, in the light of the description given by Giraldus Cambrensis. They could carry their hearth-stones with them wherever they went, so that the result seems to be that the groups of kindreds could always have been easily shifted about, as they were in fact after the English conquest, from one district or ‘villata’ to another. The geographical divisions thus became the permanent fiscal units in tribal arrangements. Both in the surveys and in the Codes we find the villata or district, and not the family group, the fixed unit for tribal food-rents to the chieftain, and for taxation after the English conquest.
The ‘tref’ or ‘maenol’ paying the ‘tunc pound.’
The surveys so far agree with the Codes. The villata of the surveys was the taxable unit, and in some cases still paid the tunc pound (or 20s.) in lieu of the chieftain’s food-rents. In other cases escheats and other causes had varied the amount. In the Codes of South Wales the unit for the tunc pound was the tref, and in the Venedotian Code of North Wales the maenol of four trefs.
Now, as in the surveys the family groups or gwelys were located so as to occupy sometimes several villatæ, and sometimes undivided shares in villatæ along with others, so, if we may take the villata of the surveys as equivalent to the tref or maenol of the Codes, we must expect to find that the kindreds of tribesmen at the period of the Codes were scattered in the same way over the trefs and maenols. And, as the maenol was a group of trefs, the tref is the unit of tribal occupation as to which a clear understanding is most necessary. In this, however, we may be, after all, only partly successful.
The word tref, though generally used for a homestead or hamlet, seems from its other meanings to involve the idea of a group.
The tref and its ‘randirs.’
There were cases in which a disputed matter of fact had to be established upon the evidence of men of the gorvotref, i.e. by men of the groups outside the tref in which the question in dispute arose.[30] And this gorvotref was not merely the next adjoining tref or trefs, but it consisted of those randirs or divisions of neighbouring trefs of uchelwrs, or tribesmen, whose boundaries touched the tref in which the disputed facts arose. Neighbouring randirs of taeog trefs, i.e. the trefs of non-tribesmen, were excluded, presumably because the testimony of taeogs in matters relating to tribesmen was not relied on. But this compound of the word tref implies that its general sense was a group of homesteads. That, in general, trefs had defined boundaries, is clear from the fact that it was an offence to break them, and this applied also to the randirs or divisions of the tref.[31]
The trefgordd of one herd and one plough.