The normal group of the taeog-tref differed from the free tref in the fact that in it no family rights were recognised. All the members of it shared in its rights and payments equally per capita, and not per stirpes. They were all liable as a body, few or many, for the whole amount of the dues to the chieftains. During their fathers’ lifetime sons shared pari passu and equally with their parents, and other members of the group, in the pasture and common ploughing, except youngest sons, who remained with their fathers.
In the gwelys, on the other hand, as in the gwelys of tribesmen, there was recognition of family or blood relationships, and a patriarchal element.
There were thus under Cymric tribal custom various subordinate grades or classes. Beginning at the bottom of the ladder were:—
(1) The slaves who could be bought and sold, and who were reckoned as worth one pound of silver.
(2) The taeogs and aillts or permanent nativi, born non-tribesmen, without recognised family rights.
(3) Non-tribesmen growing or having grown in four generations into gwelys of non-tribesmen with recognised family rights.
(4) Strangers of exceptional position who, having married into the tribe, had become tribesmen in the fourth generation by repeated intermarriage.
And once more the fact should never be lost sight of, that the gradual growth into tribal or quasi-tribal rights was not a growth into exactly what in a modern sense would be called individual freedom. It was accompanied by the growth of ties which bound the family to the chieftain, till at the moment that at the fourth generation the recognition of rights of kindred was attained, the family found itself, as we have seen, so closely tied to the chieftain and the land that the newly recognised gwely had become adscriptus glebæ.
Finally, the tribal logic of the case was probably something like this:—
The stranger a kinless man who has no protection but from his lord till a kindred has grown up around him.