Putting together the Irish and Welsh evidence in [p237] a variety of smaller points, a clearer conception may perhaps be gained than before of the character and relations to each other of the three or four orders into which tribal life seems to have separated people—the chiefs, the tribesmen, the taeogs, and under all these, and classed among chattels, the slaves.

The chief evidently corresponds less with the later lord of a manor than with the modern king. He is the head and chosen chief of the tribesmen. His office is not hereditary. His successor, his tanist or edling, is chosen in his lifetime, and is not necessarily his son.309 The chieftains of Ireland are spoken of in mediæval records and laws as reguli—little kings. When Wales (or such part of it as had not been before conquered and made manorial) was conquered by Edward I. the chieftainship did not fall into the hands of manorial lords, but was vested directly in the Prince of Wales.310

The tribesmen are men of the tribal blood, i.e. of equal blood with the chief. They, therefore, do not at all resemble serfs. They are more like manorial lords of lordships split up and divided by inheritance, than serfs. They are not truly allodial holders, for they hold tribal land; but they have no manorial lord over them. Their chief is their elected chief, not their manorial lord. When Irish chieftains claim to be owners of the tribal land in the English sense, and set up manorial claims over the tribesmen, they are disallowed by Sir John Davies. When Wales is [p238] conquered, the tunc pound is paid by the free tribesmen direct to the Prince of Wales, the substituted chieftain of the tribe, and the tribesmen remain freeholders, with no mesne lord between him and them.311 So it would have been also in Ireland if the plans of Sir John Davies had been permanently carried out.312

The taeogs are not generally the serfs of the free tribesmen, but, if serfs at all, of the chief. They are more like Roman coloni than mediæval serfs. But they are easily changed into serfs. In Ireland the mensal land on which they live is allowed by Sir John Davies to be (by a rough analogy) called the chief's demesne land. In Wales they are called in Latin documents villani; but they become after the Conquest the villani, not of manorial lords, but of the Prince of Wales, and they still live in separate trevs from the tribesmen.313

These, then, are the three orders in tribal life; while the slaves in household or field service, and more or less numerous, are, like the cattle, bought and sold, and reckoned as chattels alike under the tribal and the manorial systems.

And we may go still further. These three tribal orders of men, with their large households and cattle in the more or less nomadic stage of the tribal system, move about from place to place, and wherever they [p239] go, what may be called tribal houses must be erected for them.

The tribal house is in itself typical of their tribal and nomadic life. It is of the same type and pattern for all their orders, but varying in size according to the gradation in rank of the occupier.

It is built, like the houses observed by Giraldus Cambrensis, of trees newly cut from the forest.314 A long straight pole is selected for the roof-tree. Six well-grown trees, with suitable branches apparently reaching over to meet one another, and of about the same size as the roof-tree, are stuck upright in the ground at even distances in two parallel rows—three in each row. Their extremities bending over make a Gothic arch, and crossing one another at the top each pair makes a fork, upon which the roof-tree is fixed. These trees supporting the roof-tree are called gavaels, forks, or columns,315 and they form the nave of the tribal house. Then, at some distance back from these rows of columns or forks, low walls of stakes and wattle shut in the aisles of the house, and over all is the roof of branches and rough thatch, while at the ends are the wattle doors of entrance. All along the aisles, behind the pillars, are placed beds of rushes, [p240] called gwelys (lecti), on which the inmates sleep. The footboards of the beds, between the columns, form their seats in the daytime. The fire is lighted on an open hearth in the centre of the nave, between the middle columns, and in the chieftain's hall a screen runs between these central pillars and either wall, so partially dividing off the upper portion where the chief, the edling, and his principal officers have their own appointed places, from the lower end of the hall where the humbler members of the household are ranged in order.316 The columns, like those in Homeric houses and Solomon's temple, are sometimes cased in metal, and the silentiary, to call attention, strikes one of them with his staff. The bed or seat of the chieftain is also sometimes covered by a metal canopy.317 In his hand he holds a sceptre or wand of gold, equal in length to himself, and as thick as his little finger. He eats from a golden plate as wide as his face, and as thick as the thumb-nail of a ploughman who has handled the plough for seven years.318

The kitchen and other outbuildings are ranged round the hall, and beyond these again are the corn and the cattle-yard included in the tyddyn.

The chieftain's hall is twice the size and value of the free tribesman's, and the free tribesman's is twice [p241] that of the taeog. But the plan is the same. They are all built with similar green timber forks and roof-tree and wattle,319 with the fireplace in the nave and the rush beds in the aisles. One might almost conjecture that as the tabernacle was the type which grew into Solomon's temple, so the tribal house built of green timber and wattle, with its high nave and lower aisles, when imitated in stone, grew into the Gothic cathedral. Certainly the Gothic cathedral, simplified and reduced in size and materials to a rough and rapidly erected structure of green timber and wattle, would give no bad idea of the tribal house of Wales or Ireland. It has been noticed in a former chapter that the Bishop of Durham had his episcopal bothy, or hunting hall, erected for him every year by his villeins, in the forest, as late as the time of the Boldon Book. This also was possibly a survival of the tribal house.320

In this tribal house the undivided household of free tribesmen, comprising several generations down to the great-grandchildren of a common ancestor, lived together; and, as already mentioned, even the structure of the house was typical of the tribal family arrangement.

In the aisles were the gwelys of rushes, and the whole household was bound as it were together in one gwellygord. The gwelys were divided by the [p242] central columns, or gavaels (Welsh for 'fork'), into four separate divisions; so there were four gavaels in a trev, and four randirs in a gavael. And so in after times, long after the tribal life was broken up, the original holding of an ancient tribesman became divided in the hands of his descendants into gavells and gwelys, or weles.321

Another point has been noticed. In the old times, when the tribesmen shifted about from place to place, their personal names by necessity could not be given to the places or tyddyns they lived in. The local names in a country where the tribal system prevailed were taken from natural characteristics—the streams, the woods, the hills, which marked the site. This was the case, for instance, with the townlands and tates of Ireland. Most of them bear witness, as we have seen, by their impersonal names, to the shifting and inconstant tenancy of successive tribesmen.322

It was probably not till the tribes became stationary, and, after many generations, the same families became permanent holders of the same homesteads, that the Welsh gwelys and gavells became permanent family possessions, known by the personal name of their occupants, as we find them in the extents of the fourteenth century.323

Another characteristic of the tribal system in its early stages was the purely natural and tribal character of the system of blood-money, answering to the [p243] Wergelt of the Germans. It was not an artificial bundling together of persons in tens or tithings, like the later Saxon and Norman system of frankpledge, but strictly ruled by actual family relationship. The murderer of a man, or his relations of a certain degree, and in a certain order and proportion, according to their nearness of blood, owed the fixed amount of blood-money to the family of the murdered person, who shared it in the same order and proportions on their side.324 The same principle held good for insults and injuries, between not only individuals, but tribes. For an insult done by the tribesman of another tribe to a chief, the latter could claim one hundred cows for every cantrev in his dominion (i.e. a cow for every trev), and a golden rod.325

The tribesmen and the tribes were thus bound together by the closest ties, all springing, in the first instance, from their common blood-relationship. As this ruled the extent of their liability one for another, so it fixed both the nearness of the neighbourhood of their tyddyns, and the closeness of the relationships of their common life. And these ties were so close, and the rules of the system so firmly fixed by custom and by tribal instinct, that Roman or Saxon conquest, and centuries of Christian influence, while they modified and hardened it in some points, and stopped its actual nomadic tendencies, left its main features and spirit, in Ireland and Wales and Western Scotland, unbroken. It would seem that tribal life might well go on repeating itself, generation after generation, for a thousand years, with little variation, without [p244] really passing out of its early stages, unless in the meantime some uncontrollable force from outside of it should break its strength and force its life into other grooves.

Nor was the tenacity of the tribal system more remarkable than its universality. As an economic stage in a people's growth it seems to be well-nigh universal. It is confined to no race, to no continent, and to no quarter of the globe. Almost every people in historic or prehistoric times has passed or is passing through its stages.

Lastly, this wide prevalence and extreme tenacity of the tribal system may perhaps make it the more easy to understand the almost equally wide prevalence of that open-field system, by the simplest forms of which nomadic and pastoral tribes, forced by circumstances into a simple and common agriculture, have everywhere apparently provided themselves with corn. It is not the system of a single people or a single race, but, in its simplest form, a system belonging to the tribal stage of economic progress. And as that tribal stage may itself take a thousand years, as in Ireland, to wear itself out, so the open field system also may linger as long, adapting itself meanwhile to other economic conditions; in England becoming for centuries, under the manorial system, in a more complex form, the shell of serfdom, and leaving its débris on the fields centuries after the stage of serfdom has been passed; in Ireland following the vicissitudes of a poor and wretched peasantry, whose tribal system, running its course till suddenly arrested under other and economically sadder phases than serfdom, leaves a people swarming on the subdivided [p245] land, with scattered patches of potato ground, held in 'run-rig' or 'rundale,' and clinging to the 'grazing' on the mountain side for their single cow or pig, with a pastoral and tribal instinct ingrained in their nature as the inheritance of a thousand years.

Such in its main features seems to have been the tribal system as revealed by the earliest Irish and Welsh evidence taken together.

There remains the question, What was the relation of this tribal system to the manorial system in the south-east of England and on the continent of Europe?

III. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TRIBAL AND AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY OF THE WEST AND SOUTH-EAST OF BRITAIN WAS PRE-ROMAN, AND SO ALSO WAS THE OPEN-FIELD SYSTEM.

The manorial system of the east and the tribal system of the west of Britain have now been traced back, in turn, upon British ground, as far as the direct evidence extends, i.e. to within a very few generations of the time of the Saxon conquest; and in neither system is any indication discernible of a recent origin.

So far as the evidence has hitherto gone, the two systems were, and had long been, historically distinct. The tribal system probably once extended as far into Wessex as the eastern limits of the district long known as West Wales, i.e. as far east as Wiltshire; and within this district of England the manorial system was evidently imposed upon the conquered country, as it was later in portions of [p246] Wales, leaving only here and there, as we have found, small and mainly local survivals of the earlier tribal system.

But no evidence has yet been adduced leading to the inference that before the Saxon invasion the Welsh tribal system extended all over Britain.

Indeed, the evidence of Cæsar is clear upon the point that the economic condition of the south-east of Britain was quite distinct from that of the interior and west of Britain even in pre-Roman times.

Cæsar describes the south and east of Britain, which he calls the maritime portion, as inhabited by those who had passed over from the country of the Belgæ for the purpose of plunder and war, almost all of whom, he says, retain the name of the states (civitates) from which they came to Britain, where after the war they remained, and began to cultivate the fields. Their buildings he describes as exceedingly numerous, and very like those of the Gauls.326 The most civilised of all these nations, he says, are those who inhabit Kent, which is entirely a maritime district; nor do they differ much from Gallic customs.327

He speaks, on the other hand, of the inland inhabitants as aborigines who mostly did not sow corn, but fed upon flesh and milk.328

Now, we have seen that the main distinctive mark of the tribal system was the absence of towns and villages, and the preponderance of cattle over corn.

When corn becomes the ruling item in economic arrangements, there grows up the settled homestead and the village, with its open fields around it. [p247]

Cæsar, therefore, in describing the agriculture and buildings of the Belgic portion of England, and the non-agricultural but pastoral habits of the interior, exactly hit upon the distinctive differences between the already settled and agricultural character of the south-east and the pastoral and tribal polity of the interior and west of Britain.

Nor was this statement one resting merely upon hearsay evidence. Cæsar himself found corn crops ripening on the fields, and relied upon them for the maintenance of his army. Nay, the reason which led him to invade the island was in part the fact that the Britons had given aid to the Gauls. Further, he obtained his information about Britain from the merchants, and the news of his approach was carried by the merchants into Britain, thus making it evident that there was a commerce going on between the two coasts, even in pre-Roman times.329

We know that throughout the period of Roman occupation Britain was a corn-growing country.

Zosimus represents Julian as sending 800 vessels, larger than mere boats, backwards and forwards to Britain for corn to supply the granaries of the cities on the Rhine.330

Eumenius, in his 'Panegyric of Constantine' (A.D. 310), also describes Britain as remarkable for the richness of its corn crops and the multitude of its cattle.331

Pliny further describes the inhabitants of Britain as being so far advanced in agriculture as to plough [p248] in marl in order to increase the fertility of the fields.332

Tacitus,333 in the same way (A.D. circa 90), speaks of the soil of Britain as fertile and bearing heavy crops (patiens frugum), and describes the tricks of the tax gatherers in collecting the tributum, which was exacted in corn.334

Strabo335 (B.C. 30) mentions the export from Britain of 'corn, cattle, gold, silver, iron, skins, slaves, and dogs.'

Diodorus Siculus336 (B.C. 44) describes the manner of reaping and storing corn in England thus:—

Lastly, we have been recently reminded by Mr. Elton that Pytheas, 'the Humboldt of antiquity,' who visited Britain in the fourth century B.C., saw in the southern districts abundance of wheat in the fields, [p249] and observed the necessity of threshing it out in covered barns, instead of using the unroofed threshing-floors to which he was accustomed in Marseilles. 'The natives,' he says, 'collect the sheaves in great barns, and thresh out the corn there, because they have so little sunshine that our open threshing-places would be of little use in that land of clouds and rain.' 337

It is clear, then, that in the south-east of Britain a considerable quantity of corn was grown all through the period of Roman rule and centuries before the Roman conquest of the island. And if so, that difference between the pastoral tribal districts of the interior and the more settled agricultural districts of the south and east, noticed by Cæsar, was one of long standing.

The tribal system of Wales furnishes us, therefore, with no direct key to the economic condition of South-eastern Britain.

But, on the other hand, the continuous and long-continued growth of corn in Britain from century to century adds great interest to the further question, Upon what system was it grown?

Upon what other system can it have been grown than the open-field system? The universal prevalence of this system makes it almost certain that the fields found by Cæsar waving with ripening corn were open fields. The open-field system was hardly first introduced by the Saxons, because we find it also in Wales and Scotland. It was hardly introduced by the Romans, because its division lines and measurements [p250] are evidently not those of the Roman agrimensores. The methods of these latter are well known from their own writings. Their rules were clear and definite, and wherever they went they either adopted the previous divisions of the land, or set to work on their own system of straight lines and rectangular divisions. We may thus guess what an open field would have been if laid out, de novo, by the Roman agrimensores; and conclude that the irregular network or spider's web of furlongs and strips in the actual open fields of England with which we have become familiar is as great a contrast as could well be imagined to what the open field would have been if laid out directly under Roman rules.

We happen to know also, from passages which we shall have occasion to quote hereafter, that the Roman agrimensores did find in other provinces—we have no direct evidence for Britain—an open-field system, with its irregular boundaries, its joint occupation, its holdings of scattered pieces, and its common rights of way and of pasture, existing in many districts—in multis regionibus—where the red tape rules of their craft had not been consulted, and the land was not occupied by regularly settled Roman colonies.338

The open-field system in some form or other we may understand, then, to have preceded in Britain even the Roman occupation. And perhaps we may go one step further. If the practice of ploughing marl into the ground mentioned by Pliny was an early and local peculiarity of Britain and of Gaul, as it seems to have been from his description, then clearly [p251] it indicates a more advanced stage of the system than the early Welsh co-aration of portions of the waste. The marling of land implies a settled arable farming of the same land year after year, and not a ploughing up of new ground each year. It does not follow that there was yet a regular rotation of crops in three courses, and so the fully organised three-field system; but evidently there were permanent arable fields devoted to the growth of corn, and separate from the grass land and waste, before Roman improvements were made upon British agriculture.

But the prevalence of an open-field husbandry in its simpler forms was, as we have been taught by the investigation into the tribal systems of Wales and Ireland, no evidence of the prevalence of that particular form of the open-field husbandry which was connected with the manorial system, and of which the yard-land was an essential feature. In order to ascertain the probability of the manorial system having been introduced by the Saxons, or having preceded the Saxon conquest in the south and east of Britain, it becomes necessary to examine the manorial system in its Continental history, so as if possible, working once more from the known to the unknown—this time from the better known Roman and German side of the question—to find some stepping-stones at least over the chasm in the English evidence.