The twelve-hyndemen were therefore landholders, surrounded, in principle at least if not always in practice, by a kindred. But what kind of a landholding was it?
Position of the first settlers.
Approaching the question strictly from a tribal point of view, the solidarity of the kindred involved in the payment and receipt of wergelds would certainly suggest that those who had a right to receive and the obligation to pay held a position in their kindred quite different from that of the modern individual owner of land.
The analogy of Welsh and Irish and Salic and Norse and Scanian tribal custom would lead us to infer that the Anglo-Saxon settlers in England must have brought with them traditions of tribal or family ownership more or less of the type of the Cymric gwely, though doubtless modified by emigration and settlement in a new country.
Separation from their kindreds threw them on the protection of the king.
After all that has been said, traditions and perhaps actual examples of the individual ownership of the ‘Romanus possessor,’ and, still more likely, actual experience of the Roman type of landed estates, may have survived in Britain from the period of the Roman occupation, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers may easily have been influenced in the matter of landholding by what as conquerors they came to supplant. But they can hardly have wholly cast off their own tribal traditions and instincts. The continued payment and receipt of wergelds show that they did not. Even, to take an extreme case, if they came to Britain as single settlers having left their kinsmen behind them, still kindreds would gradually grow up around their descendants in the new country. And tribal custom left to itself would give to them landed rights, quite different from those of the individual owner. But the interval, apart from other outside influences, may well have subjected tribal custom to a strain.
From the point of view of this interval it may not be unreasonable to revert to the clauses of King Alfred’s laws on ‘kinless men’ and the Norman precedent, that the king was to take the place of the missing maternal kindred and of advocate for a Norman if he had no other.[322]
Unless, therefore, the twelve-hynde settler was surrounded by a full kindred in the new country, he must, according to his own tribal custom, have found himself much more of an individual than he was used to be, and therefore more dependent upon the protection of his chieftain or king.
We must not, on the one hand, conceive of the twelve-hynde settler as having all at once adopted the independent position of the Roman ‘possessor,’ though circumstances may have sometimes severed him as completely from his ‘parentilla’ as the ceremony of the Salic law. Nor can we, on the other hand, conceive of him always as a tribesman surrounded by his kindred. He may evidently, on the one hand, be released from many of the trammels involved in membership of a kindred, but, on the other hand, he is thrown more than ever under conditions of service to the king.
Service under tribal custom not degrading. But the ties of kindred involved restraint on individual action.