It would be unwise to press analogies between Cymric and Salic tribal custom too far, but I have before pointed out that a system of wergelds, to which paternal and maternal relatives each individually contributed their share, seems to imply an original solidarity of kindred, which must, wherever it was fully in force, have been connected with a corresponding solidarity in the occupation of land, together with its complement, an individual ownership of cattle. And in the light of the ‘de alodis’ it does not seem unlikely that it may have been so under ancient Salic custom. [Sidenote: Distinction between land under Salic and land under Roman law.] If the foregoing considerations be accepted, may we not recognise in the term _terra Salica_, as at first used, a meaning analogous to that which Professor Vinogradoff has recently so brilliantly given to the Anglo-Saxon term ‘folc-land’?[117] In both cases surely it was natural that there should be a term distinguishing land still held under the rules of ancient tribal custom from land held under the Romanised rules of individual landownership. It is not necessary to do more than allude here to the various clauses of the Lex Salica from which the existence of individual holdings is clearly to be inferred. If, from this single mention of _terra Salica_ and its ultimate division among great-grandsons _per capita_, the continued existence of tribal or family holdings held still under Salic law may be legitimately inferred, it is at least equally clear that the _Romanus possessor_ who lived and held his possession as _res propria_ under Roman law also existed. And if so the two classes of holders of land must often have been neighbours. The vicini, ‘qui in villa consistunt,’ of the title ‘de migrantibus’ (XLV.) may some of them have been of the one class and some of them of the other. The objection of a single person living under Salic law to the interloper would have a new meaning and become very natural if the conflict between the two systems were involved. And when we have reminded ourselves of these facts the title _De eum qui se de parentilla tollere vult_, to which allusion has already been made, which enabled the tribesman, by the somewhat theatrical action of breaking the four sticks of alder over his head, to cut himself loose from his parentilla, takes its proper place as evidence of the temptation which must have beset the young tribesman in close contact with Gallo-Roman neighbours to free himself from what had come to be regarded as a bondage, and to take an independent position as an individual under the new order of things which was fast undermining the old. * * * * * [Sidenote: Edict of Chilperic A.D. 561-584.] Besides the title ‘de alodis’ there is another source of information which must not be overlooked--viz. the Edict of Chilperic (A.D. 561-584).[118]