Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law: Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'Seebohm, Frederic
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Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law: Being an Essay Supplemental to (1) 'The English Village Community', (2) 'The Tribal System in Wales'
Seebohm, Frederic
Anglo-Saxons; Law, Anglo-Saxon; Law, Medieval; Tribes -- Great Britain
And after the brothers are dead, the first cousins are to
equalise if they will it; and thus they are to do: the heir of
the youngest brother is to equalise, and the heir of the eldest
brother is to choose, and so by seniority unto the youngest; and
that distribution is to continue between them during their lives.
And if second cousins should dislike the distribution which took
place between their parents, they also may co-equate in the same
manner as the first cousins; and after that division no one is
either to distribute or to co-equate. Tir gwelyauc is to be
treated as we have above stated.[22]
[Sidenote: Clauses in the Dimetian Code.]
In the Dimetian Code the same rules of division are stated as follows:
When brothers share their patrimony (tref-eu-tat) between them,
the youngest is to have the principal tyddyn, and all the
buildings of his father, and eight erws of land, his boiler, his
fuel hatchet, and his coulter, because a father cannot give those
three to any but the youngest son, and though they should be
pledged they never become forfeited. Then let every brother take
a homestead (eissydyn) with eight erws of land, and the youngest
son is to share, and they are to choose in succession from the
eldest to the youngest.
Three times shall the same patrimony be shared between three
grades of a kindred, first between brothers, the second time
between cousins, the third time between second cousins, after
that there is no propriate share of land.[23]
* * * * *
After there shall have been a sharing of land acquiesced in by
co-inheritors, no one of them has a claim on the share of the
other, he having issue, except for a sub-share _when the time for
that shall arrive_. Yet whosoever shall not have any issue of his
body, _his co-inheritors, within the three degrees of kin from
the stock, are to be his heirs_.[24]
Only by adhering very closely to these texts can the gwely be understood.
They seem at first sight to refer to the tyddyns or homesteads, but, as
we have seen, the landed rights of grazing in the villatæ in which the
gwelys were located were included also.
[Sidenote: How the divisions worked out in practice.]
It would obviously be a fair critical question to ask, what happened when
the second cousins at last broke up the gwely of their grandfather and
divided the land, or let us say the homesteads and the tribal rights of
grazing on the land, for the last time equally _per capita_? There might
be twenty or thirty of such second cousins. Did the original gwely split
up into twenty or thirty new gwelys? Let us try to realise what happened
by carefully following the text, in the light of the Denbigh Survey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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