_Achau y Saint_ was the _Who’s Who_ of the Welsh Church. Now when an ecclesiastic founded a church and obtained land around it, constituting what we may call his parish, that church and parish became the hereditary property of his family. It was accordingly of first importance to establish who he was, and who were his blood relations. Thenceforth every pater-familias of his family had rights to land in the benefice, be he layman or cleric. All the land in the parish belonged to the family of the saint. To establish a right to land in it a man had to prove his descent; consequently, next to fixing the pedigree of the founder came the preservation of the genealogies of the descendants. It did not in the least matter whether they were in Holy Orders or not, they had hereditary rights in the benefice. If among them there were one, two, or even a dozen, who were clerics, all these clerics were co-rectors--that is to say, they had their rights to land in the parish as kinsmen of the saintly founder. What they received in their clerical capacity were surplice dues. Gerald the Welshman, who lived in the twelfth century, speaks of it as an “infamous custom.” No doubt it did not work well. There was no responsible priest with the cure of souls. Some one or other of the tribe who was in sacred orders celebrated divine service and administered the sacraments, but all went on in a hugger-mugger way. Gerald speaks of parishes with several rectors. Even bishoprics passed from father to son. Archbishop Peckham, in his visitation in 1284, complained that this custom was ruinous to the well-being of the Church. As all the householders of an ecclesiastical tribe lived on the proceeds of the benefice, there was scarcely enough coming in to the share of the actual priest who ministered, to support him. The principle of co-ownership in land prevailed in the secular tribes, and it extended to the ecclesiastical tribes as well, that is to say, to those of the saint’s kin living about the church on Church lands. Gerald says:-- “The Church has almost as many parsons or parties as there are principal men in the parish, and the sons, after the decease of their fathers, succeed to the ecclesiastical benefices, not by election, but by hereditary right; and if a bishop should dare to presume to appoint or to institute anyone else, the people would most certainly revenge the injury on the institution or the instituted.”