The question who had to pay and who had to receive was moreover complicated further by the fact that it involved maternal relations as well as paternal relations. It has been very properly pointed out that, however it might be as regards money payments, it is difficult to conceive how the liability of maternal relations could be worked in the case of actual blood feud and fighting. A man might have to fight for his maternal relations against his paternal relations, or the reverse. In such a case what must he do? How should he act? He might be in an impossible position. Light upon this point and others may be obtained, perhaps, when the evidence of ‘Beowulf’ is analysed. This evidence will show that a man may have good cause under tribal custom not to join in some feuds. And further it will remind us that feuds often arose in contravention of tribal usage, breaking the peace which in theory the link of marriage ought to have secured. In the meantime it would seem possible that the custom of a tribe might, for anything we know, forbid marriage _within_ the near relationships of the gwely, and _beyond_ the limits of the wider kindred. In such a case, paternal and maternal relations might all be within the kindred, so that properly speaking a quarrel between them could not become the subject of a feud. [Sidenote: Marriage a link between two gwelys. But as regards galanas the wife remained in her own kindred.] In such matters it is obvious that a good deal must depend upon the view taken of marriage itself at the particular stage of evolution in which the society might be. And it may as well be said at once that we should be quite wrong were we to regard marriage from the Roman point of view, _i.e._ as a transfer of the woman out of the _potestas_ of her parents into the _potestas_ of the husband. The Cymric example, to begin with, was quite different. The marriage of sisters to tribesmen from whom their sons could inherit tribal rights was a duty cast upon the kinsmen of the gwely.[26] It was thus an arrangement between two gwelys--a link between them--but no transfer. If a wife were slain, her galanas or death fine did not go to the husband and his family; it went to her kindred.[27] If a wife should commit murder, it was the wife’s family and not the husband’s on which rested the payment of galanas for her crime.[28] If the husband were killed the wife took one third of the saraad or fine for insult and wounding, but she took no part of the galanas of her husband.[29] These points are in a sense unexpected. They belong to a stage of social life as far removed from Roman rules, or modern ones, as they are from the stage in which a wife was either purchased outright or stolen. And yet we shall find them in principle more or less clearly repeated in the varying customs of some of the tribes whose laws we are about to examine. IV. THE FISCAL UNIT FOR THE PURPOSE OF FOOD-RENTS TO THE CHIEFTAINS.