The kindred of the aillts or strangers who settled upon a chieftain’s land under Cymric custom was acknowledged in the fourth generation of continued occupation, but at the moment a kindred was acknowledged its members became _adscripti glebæ_. When the Irish fuidhir did the same his descendants of the fourth generation found themselves not only bound to the land, but also bound together by something like the rules of the Cymric gwely, so that one of them could not sell or charge his share without the consent of the others. We found the same thing in Norway, where the rules for payment of the wergelds by relations were more elaborate than anywhere else, and where the growth of kindred seems so completely to have ruled the rise from one social grade to another, till at last a man whose great-grandfather’s great-grandfather was a freeborn landholder became an odaller. If at first sight we were to picture the odalman to ourselves as an individual freeholder of Roman or modern type we should soon find out our mistake when we learned that if he wanted to sell his odal he must first _consult his odal-sharers_. When examined closely the fact became evident that it was the _group of kindred_ that by long settlement on the land had become odal, and that the shares of individuals in the odal were subject--with, of course, many differences--to some such tribal customs as those of the Cymric gwely. The odalman was thus not a single isolated landowner. He was surrounded by kindred odal like himself, reciprocally bound to fight for one another and swear for one another, and to share in the payment or receipt of one another’s wergeld. The odalman was protected by his kindred, but his freedom of individual action was restricted by it. [Sidenote: The Salic alod a family holding.] So also under Salic law the joint inheritors of the alod on _terra Salica_, with right of redivision between great-grandchildren _per capita_, were in the same way trammelled, and when by a solemn public form they released themselves from their obligations to their kindred they relinquished also all rights of inheritance and protection (p. 134). Are we to consider these Continental analogies to be without relevance to Anglo-Saxon landholding? Dr. Konrad von Maurer, in those masterly papers contributed in 1855 to the ‘Kritische Ueberschau’ which are still so valuable, rightly lays stress upon the power of the _kindred_ as the great rival of the power of the _state_ in the development of Anglo-Saxon polity. We find but little direct allusion to the kindred in the laws, it is true. But incidentally and as it were by accident we have learned from passages mentioned in their proper place that so late as the time of Athelstan there were kindreds both twelve-hynde and twy-hynde powerful enough to defy the King’s peace.[323]