There were thus under Cymric tribal custom various subordinate grades or classes. Beginning at the bottom of the ladder were:-- (1) The slaves who could be bought and sold, and who were reckoned as worth one pound of silver. (2) The taeogs and aillts or permanent _nativi_, born non-tribesmen, without recognised family rights. (3) Non-tribesmen growing or having grown in four generations into gwelys of non-tribesmen with recognised family rights. (4) Strangers of exceptional position who, having married into the tribe, had become tribesmen in the fourth generation by repeated intermarriage. And once more the fact should never be lost sight of, that the gradual growth into tribal or quasi-tribal rights was not a growth into exactly what in a modern sense would be called individual freedom. It was accompanied by the growth of ties which bound the family to the chieftain, till at the moment that at the fourth generation the recognition of rights of kindred was attained, the family found itself, as we have seen, so closely tied to the chieftain and the land that the newly recognised gwely had become _adscriptus glebæ_. Finally, the tribal logic of the case was probably something like this:-- [Sidenote: The stranger a kinless man who has no protection but from his lord till a kindred has grown up around him.] The free tribesman is the man who belongs to a kindred who can protect him by oath and by sword. Until a stranger has kinsmen who can do this he is an odd or kinless man, protected only by his lord. If he be killed his galanas goes to his lord; he has no recognised kin to receive it. If, on the other hand, he is charged with slaying another, he has no kin to swear to his innocence, the oath of a non-tribesman not being held good as against a tribesman. If guilty, he has no kin bound to fight in the feud for him, or to help him to pay a galanas for his crime. So that even when at the fourth generation the descendant of the alltud becomes the founder of a gwely he has gained only half the status of a tribesman. It is not till the fourth generation of descendants in the gwely, _i.e._ the seventh generation from the original settler, that a complete kindred has grown up. It is not till then that the descendant of the original alltud is surrounded by a full group of relatives, born in his great-grandfather’s gwely, whose oaths can be taken and who can protect him by oath and sword or in payment of galanas. All this time the alltud family have been more or less dependent on the protection of the chieftain, and rights and obligations are apt to be correlative.