It has already been shown that such arable fields as there are in Wales, like the Saxon arable fields, were _open_ fields. They were shown to be divided by turf balks, two furrows wide,[214] into strips called erws--representing a day's work in ploughing. The Welsh laws were also found to supply the simplest and clearest solution given anywhere of the reason of the scattering of the strips in the holdings, as well as of the relations of the grades of holdings to the number of oxen contributed by the holders to the common plough team of eight oxen. In fact, the Welsh codes clearly prove that, as regards arable husbandry, the open field system was the system prevalent throughout all the three districts of Wales. [p187] «The Welsh mainly pastoral.» But partly from the mountainous nature of the country, and partly from the peculiar stage of economic development through which the Welsh were passing, long after the Norman Conquest they were still a _pastoral_ people. Cattle rather than corn claimed the first consideration, and ruled their habits; and hence the Welsh land system, even in later times, was very different from that of the Saxons. In fact, the two land systems, though both using an open-field husbandry, were in their main features radically distinct. In those parts of Wales which were unconquered, and therefore uncivilised, till the conquest of Edward I., we look in vain in the early surveys for the manor or estate with the village community in villenage upon it. «No manors or villages.» The Welsh system was not manorial. Its unit was not a village community on a lord's estate. «Scattered green timber houses.» As late as the twelfth century _Giraldus Cambrensis_[215] described the houses of the Welsh as not built either in towns or even in villages, but as scattered along the edges of the woods. To his eye they seemed mere huts made of boughs of trees twisted together, easily constructed, and lasting scarcely more than a season. They consisted of one room, and the whole family, guests and all, slept on rushes laid along the wall, with their feet to the fire, the smoke of which found its way through a hole in the roof.[216] The Welsh, in fact, being a _pastoral_ people, had two sets of homesteads. In summer their herds fed on the higher ranges of the hills, and in winter in the valleys. So they themselves, following their cattle, had separate [p188] huts for summer and for winter use, as was also the custom in the Highlands of Scotland, and is still the case in the higher Alpine valleys. Giraldus Cambrensis describes the greater part of the land as in pasture and very little as arable; and accordingly the food of the Welsh he describes, just as Cæsar had described it eleven centuries earlier, as being chiefly the produce of their herds--milk, cheese and butter, and flesh in larger proportions than bread.[217] The latter was mostly of oats. «Welsh ploughing.»