If one leysing marries another, and both father and mother have made their freedom ale, the children of the marriage inherit from both. This is the beginning of the rights to inherit. But it is accompanied by the obligation to keep the children, who are no longer thralls of the master but leysings like their parents. What happens, then, if the parents fall into poverty and cannot keep their children? Is the master to keep them or are they to starve? En ef þau verða at þrotom, þá ero þat grafgangsmenn. Scal grava gröf í kirkiugarðe, oc setia þau þar í, oc láta þar deyia. Take skapdróttenn þat ór er lengst livir, oc fœðe þat síðan. (63) If they come to extreme want, they are _grafgangsmenn_. A grave shall be dug in the churchyard, and they shall be put into it and left to die there. The master shall take out the one who lives the longest, and feed that one thereafter.[184] But it is not all leysing families which come to this gruesome pass. It may be presumed that the leysing who had ‘made his freedom ale’ and married and could make his own bargains and keep what property he and his wife could accumulate was mostly prosperous. [Sidenote: Children could inherit from him, but no other kin.] In clause 106 the rules as to ‘leysing inheritance’ are described. If the leysing who ‘made his freedom ale’ afterwards had children they could inherit. But he had no other kin who could inherit: so if he died childless the master took the property. As generation after generation passed and a wider kindred was formed, any one of his (the leysing’s) kin took in preference to the master and his descendants. But the rights or chances of inheritance on the side of the master’s family did not cease for nine generations from the first leysing who had ‘made his freedom ale.’ So that if a leysing even of the eighth generation died without kin the inheritance in this extreme case went to the descendants of the master of the first leysing ‘to the ninth knee’ rather than pass by failure of kin to the king. Leysings erfð … scal taca til niunda knés, fyrr en undir konong gange. Ðegar leysings sun tecr efter faður sínn, þá take hverr efter annan. Nú verðr þar aldauða arfr í leysings kyni, oc er engi sá maðr er þar er í erfða tale við hann er andaðr er ór leysings kyninu, þá scal hinn er ór skapdróttens kvísl er, taca til níunda knés fyrr en undir konong gange, þó at sá sé hinn átte er andaðr er frá leysingjanom. (G. c. 106.) A leysing’s inheritance shall be taken to the ninth knee before it falls to the king. When a leysing’s son takes after his father, then let one take after the other. If in a leysing’s kin there comes to be an ‘all-dead’ inheritance, and no one has inheritance-right after the deceased man of the leysing’s kin, then one of his master’s kin shall take to the ninth knee before it falls to the king, even though the deceased man be the eighth from the leysing.