Indeed, I have insisted from the first that while, in the ‘Germania’ of Tacitus, the germs may be found of an ‘embryo manor,’ both Roman and German elements probably combined in producing the later manorial system and serfdom which grew up in what were once the Roman provinces of Gaul and the two Germanies, and even also in Britain.[56] But I think that in Cymric tribal custom we may find a fresh clue worth following in the attempt to gather from Continental evidence the methods likely to be used by conquering German or Anglo-Saxon tribes in the treatment of strangers in blood.[57]
After four generations on the land they become adscripti glebæ and obtain recognition of kindred.
In Welsh tribal custom alltuds or strangers and their descendants (not necessarily otherwise unfree persons) having some special circumstances in their favour, being allowed to settle within the district of a greater or lesser chieftain upon land which, in a sense, may have been his demesne land, were free to remove and settle under another chieftain, unless and until they had remained on the same land or under the same lordship for four generations. But thereafter the great-grandchildren of the original settlers became adscripti glebæ. And this fixture to the land, or rather to the lordship, was apparently not looked upon as in any way a degradation in rank, but on the contrary a step in advance towards the recognition of tribal rights. The great-grandson of the stranger did not indeed become a Cymric tribesman, but he gained the recognition of his status as the founder of a kindred of his own, the members of which in after-generations would, as kinsmen, be able to swear for and defend one another.
This being so in the case of free strangers coming into the country, the next question is what was the position of the semi-servile class, the aillts and taeogs of the Codes, who and whose ancestors for many generations had been born upon the land in a semi-servile condition?
Their rights increase with growth of kindred.
The fixture to the land of the aillt or taeog was not the special mark so much of a semi-servile condition as of his want of recognised kindred, and under the local custom of South Wales it seems that he too, like the alltud, could sometimes arrive at the recognition of kindred, without indeed becoming a Cymric tribesman, at the end of four generations of residence under the chieftain of the land; and even to further recognition of it, involving a still better position as to rights, at the ninth generation. The ninth man in South Wales seems according to local custom in some districts to have, at last, climbed the highest rung of the ladder, and to have attained the right to claim the status of a Cymric tribesman.
This curious rise under Cymric custom, by steps of four generations, up the ladder towards the recognition of tribal rights, seems to have a suggestive correspondence with the reverse process under manorial usage of proving the serfdom of a nativus by showing that the great-grandfather was a nativus on the lord’s land, the manorial rule being that settlement on servile land for four generations made the posterity of an original settler into nativi.[58]
Want of kindred the key to their position.
Once more let us try to realise what this meant, and what was the position of these Cymric non-tribesmen in regard to their settlement on land.
If under the guidance of the Codes we turn to the extents and surveys, we find them living, in some cases, not mixed up with the tribesmen, but in separate groups, or trefs, or trefgordds. There may be here and there exceptional alltuds or strangers of a higher class growing up, by the gradual process of intermarriage for four generations with tribeswomen, into the status of tribesmen. But the mass of the stranger class were aillts and taeogs living in separate taeog trefs, though, according to the surveys, sharing, often in common, certain rights of grazing over certain districts with gwelys of tribesmen. Now these groups of taeogs and aillts were, according to the Codes, as we have seen, of two classes, and we recognise the same two classes when we find in the surveys not only groups of taeogs in taeog-trefs but also gwelys of non-tribesmen.