There is no subject requiring more careful investigation than the combination of circumstances out of which arose what is roughly called serfdom, _i.e._ the attachment of tenants to the land rendering services to a lord. I shall not be suspected of suggesting that tribal customs and methods were the _sole_ factors which produced serfdom and of ignoring the influences which came from Roman methods of managing landed estates, and from Roman law modified by ecclesiastical usage. Indeed, I have insisted from the first that while, in the ‘Germania’ of Tacitus, the germs may be found of an ‘embryo manor,’ both Roman and German elements probably combined in producing the later manorial system and serfdom which grew up in what were once the Roman provinces of Gaul and the two Germanies, and even also in Britain.[56] But I think that in Cymric tribal custom we may find a fresh clue worth following in the attempt to gather from Continental evidence the methods likely to be used by conquering German or Anglo-Saxon tribes in the treatment of strangers in blood.[57] [Sidenote: After four generations on the land they become _adscripti glebæ_ and obtain recognition of kindred.] In Welsh tribal custom _alltuds_ or strangers and their descendants (not necessarily otherwise unfree persons) having some special circumstances in their favour, being allowed to settle within the district of a greater or lesser chieftain upon land which, in a sense, may have been his demesne land, were free to remove and settle under another chieftain, unless and until they had remained on the same land or under the same lordship for four generations. But thereafter the great-grandchildren of the original settlers became _adscripti glebæ_. And this fixture to the land, or rather to the lordship, was apparently not looked upon as in any way a degradation in rank, but on the contrary a step in advance towards the recognition of tribal rights. The great-grandson of the stranger did not indeed become a Cymric tribesman, but he gained the recognition of his status as the founder of a kindred of his own, the members of which in after-generations would, as kinsmen, be able to swear for and defend one another. This being so in the case of free strangers coming into the country, the next question is what was the position of the semi-servile class, the _aillts_ and _taeogs_ of the Codes, who and whose ancestors for many generations had been born upon the land in a semi-servile condition? [Sidenote: Their rights increase with growth of kindred.]