This permanence of the geographical divisions and homesteads, and shifting of the tribal households whenever occasion required it, was only possible with a pastoral and scanty population. Long before the fourteenth century the households were settled in their homesteads, geometrical regularity had ceased, and the land was divided and subdivided into irregular fractions. This is the state of things disclosed in the _Record of Carnarvon_. But in the tenth century, according to the Welsh laws, the old tribal rules were apparently still in force. «The clustering of households the distinctive mark of the tribal system.» Without pretending to have mastered all the details of these obscure tribal arrangements, the point to be noted is that the scattering of the tyddyns all over the country side, and the clustering of them by fours and sixteens, or twelves, into the group which was the unit paying the gwestva or tunc pound, and again into clusters of twelve or thirteen[260] under a [p206] maer, as the unit of civil jurisdiction, were obviously distinctive features arising from the tribal holding of land, and that the system was adopted apparently to facilitate the division of the land among the families in the tribe somewhat in the same way as in the open field system the division of the arable land by turf balks into actual erws facilitated the division of the ploughed land among the contributors to the plough team. * * * * * Bearing this in mind we may now turn back to the Domesday Survey, and compare its description of the land system of _Gwent_ and _Archenfield_ with the results obtained from the Welsh laws. In order, however, to make this comparison the Welsh terms must be translated into Latin, otherwise it will be difficult to recognise the trev, and maer, and maenol, and gwestva in the Domesday description. «Latin equivalent of tribal words in the Domesday Survey.» The before-mentioned Latin version of the Dimetian Code, the MS. of which dates from the early thirteenth century, will do this for us.[261] It translates _trev_, the unit of the tunc pound, by _villa_. It takes the Welsh word 'maenol' as equivalent to _manor_, and indeed it did resemble the Saxon and Norman manor in this, that it was the unit of the jurisdiction of each single steward or _villicus_ of the chief. This officer was called in Welsh the _maer_, which was translated into the Latin _præpositus_. He did to some extent resemble the English præpositus, but he differed in this--that instead of being set over the 'trev' or 'villata' of a single manor, [p207] the Welsh maer was, as we have seen, set over a number of 'villas' or trevs--thirteen free trevs or seven taeog-trevs, in Gwent--each free trev of which rendered its 'tunc pound' or 'gwestva,' and each taeog or villein-trev its 'dawn-bwyd' of food. Now, this is precisely what is described in the Domesday Survey of Gwent.