Let us for a moment revert to the tribal conception of these trammels and services. They did not always involve degradation of social condition. They often, as we have seen, were the mark of the attainment of a higher position.
The Norse odalman a sharer in the odal, with duties to his kindred.
The kindred of the aillts or strangers who settled upon a chieftain’s land under Cymric custom was acknowledged in the fourth generation of continued occupation, but at the moment a kindred was acknowledged its members became adscripti glebæ. When the Irish fuidhir did the same his descendants of the fourth generation found themselves not only bound to the land, but also bound together by something like the rules of the Cymric gwely, so that one of them could not sell or charge his share without the consent of the others. We found the same thing in Norway, where the rules for payment of the wergelds by relations were more elaborate than anywhere else, and where the growth of kindred seems so completely to have ruled the rise from one social grade to another, till at last a man whose great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was a freeborn landholder became an odaller. If at first sight we were to picture the odalman to ourselves as an individual freeholder of Roman or modern type we should soon find out our mistake when we learned that if he wanted to sell his odal he must first consult his odal-sharers. When examined closely the fact became evident that it was the group of kindred that by long settlement on the land had become odal, and that the shares of individuals in the odal were subject—with, of course, many differences—to some such tribal customs as those of the Cymric gwely. The odalman was thus not a single isolated landowner. He was surrounded by kindred odal like himself, reciprocally bound to fight for one another and swear for one another, and to share in the payment or receipt of one another’s wergeld. The odalman was protected by his kindred, but his freedom of individual action was restricted by it.
The Salic alod a family holding.
So also under Salic law the joint inheritors of the alod on terra Salica, with right of redivision between great-grandchildren per capita, were in the same way trammelled, and when by a solemn public form they released themselves from their obligations to their kindred they relinquished also all rights of inheritance and protection (p. 134).
Are we to consider these Continental analogies to be without relevance to Anglo-Saxon landholding?
Dr. Konrad von Maurer, in those masterly papers contributed in 1855 to the ‘Kritische Ueberschau’ which are still so valuable, rightly lays stress upon the power of the kindred as the great rival of the power of the state in the development of Anglo-Saxon polity. We find but little direct allusion to the kindred in the laws, it is true. But incidentally and as it were by accident we have learned from passages mentioned in their proper place that so late as the time of Athelstan there were kindreds both twelve-hynde and twy-hynde powerful enough to defy the King’s peace.[323]
This is in itself a significant reminder that more or less of tribal custom remained in force behind the screen of the laws from which most of our evidence has been taken. And yet we seem to be almost forced to the conclusion that if we try to realise the position of the twelve-hynde settler we must regard him, at all events for the first few generations, as in a very different position from that of the Norse odalman in the old country. Even though as head of his family he may have brought descendants and dependents with him, he could not in the new country be at once surrounded by kinsmen and odal-sharers who with himself had hereditary rights in the land.
Anglo-Saxon twelve-hynde settler pays gafol and service direct to the king.
We thus come round again to the point that so far as he may have been separated from his kindred the first Anglo-Saxon settler must have found himself thrown upon the protection of his chief and into a position of individual service. He becomes, as we have seen according to the scanty evidence of the Laws of Ine, a king’s gesith, with military and judicial and administrative duties to discharge, put into a post of service which he cannot relinquish at pleasure. Service to the king has to some extent taken the place of the restraints of kindred, and so in a sense, like the twy-hynde man, he has become a gafolgelda, but paying his gafol and services direct to the king, and adscriptus glebæ, but tied to an estate and an official position instead of to a yardland.