The open-field system of agriculture was in its main principles and chief methods common to German and Celtic tribes. But we are told that the Germans knew nothing of co-operative ploughing and the team of eight oxen on which the agricultural hidage of England was so clearly based. For the team of eight oxen we must go to the Cymric Codes and the practice in the Isle of Man and Scotland. It was common to these Celtic regions, even to its details—the yoke of four oxen abreast and the driver walking backwards in front of the team.[270] In such a matter as the method of ploughing there may well have been continuity.
We seem to see in the Laws of Ine the process going on of transition from the tribal form of the open-field system—the co-aration of the waste—to the more fixed forms of settled and permanent agriculture.
The allotment of stock and homestead by the lord to the gebur was the basis of the tenancy.
Thus, without pressing analogies too far, there may be a root of tribal custom discernible even in the system of settling geburs on yardlands. Something very much like it was followed on the Continent under Roman usage. But the case of the veteran to whom a pair of oxen with seed of two kinds was given as his outfit only partly resembled the case of the gebur. In the case of the gebur the outfit of oxen remained in theory the property of the lord, and returned to him on the death of the tenant. This was the essential point which created the semi-servile tenancy. With the homestead went the ‘setene’ or outfit and the corresponding obligation not only of gafol but also of week-work, and out of the peculiar relation so established may have grown up in West Wales, as in Wales itself and Ireland, very easily the doctrine that after its continuance for four generations the tenant became adscriptus glebæ.
The allotment of stock by the Irish chieftain formed, as we have seen, in a cattle-breeding rather than an agricultural community the traditional tie between himself and his tenants, whether tribesmen or strangers. The Cymric chieftain of a kindred followed very nearly the same traditional practice when he gave to the young tribesman on his attaining the age of fourteen his da (or allotment of cattle) for his maintenance, thereby establishing the relation of ‘man and kin’ between him and the chief.
The same tribal principles were, moreover, applied to strangers both in Ireland and Wales. The Irish ‘fuidhir’ thus settled on the chieftain’s land became, as we have seen, after four generations adscriptus glebæ, and so did the Aillt or Alltud settled on the Cymric chieftain’s land. And the same number of generations attached the nativus to the land under early Scotch law.
Now, if under tribal usage this was so, it need not be surprising that in the newly conquered districts of West Wales or more generally in Wessex at the time of King Ine, when the extension of agriculture was an immediate necessity, something like the same traditional system should continue or come again naturally into use, producing something like the same kind of dependence of one class upon the other.
This system of settlement very general.
It is necessary to point out that this method of settling tenants on yardlands with an outfit of a pair of oxen &c. was more or less general, because doubts have been recently thrown upon it. Its prevalence as a custom does not rest entirely on the evidence of the ‘Rectitudines’ but on several incidental mentions of it in various and distant quarters.
Kent.