Welsh Journals

THE TRIBAL SYSTEM IN WALES: A RE-ASSESSMENT IN THE LIGHT OF SETTLEMENT STUDIES FROM the days of Seebohm onwards, students of the so-called tribal system in Wales have used the patterns and forms of settlement characteristic in modern Wales to buttress their arguments con- cerning the economic bases of early Welsh society.1 Unfortunately, the uncritical use made of settlement forms and patterns existing at present has of itself contributed to basic misconceptions about the salient characteristics of early Welsh social organization. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the systematic study of settle- ments in their geographical setting can shed a new light on the social and economic conditions prevailing in Wales in the Dark Ages. Seebohm originally used the evidence of settlement forms to illustrate his thesis that English economic history began with the serfdom, under manorial lordship, of the masses of the people.2 As part of his argument he claimed that both the village communities of eastern Britain and the tribal communities of western Britain had their own distinctive open field systems, of pre-Roman origin; nevertheless he considered the settlement forms of the two types of community to be quite distinct. He regarded the Saxon 'hams' and 'tuns' as nucleated settlements occupied by village communities in serfdom, but portrayed the tribal Welsh as living in 'homesteads scattered about the countryside'. Seebohm's qualification that these homesteads were grouped into 'artificial clusters, mainly, as we shall see, for purposes of tribute or legal jurisdiction' may perhaps be interpreted as indicating his uncertainty about precise settlement forms. Somewhat uncritically he accepted both small nucleated hamlets and scattered homesteads as the characteristic forms of settlement associated with the tribal system in Wales; both forms he regarded as a visible and abiding expression in Wales of the universal 'tribal stage' of economic progress. 3 Seebohm's equation of settlement forms with a particular stage of human culture is a feature of some importance, for it helps to account for the development in the twentieth century of the quite unfounded 1 F. Seebohm. The Tribal System in Wales (1904). 2 F. Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883), p. ix. 3 F. Seebohm. The English Village Community (1905), pp. 8. 126. 224-5. 229-9, 437. See also his Customary Acres and their Historical Importance (1914), pp. 18. 76. 261. Maitland, despite his attack on Seebohm's main thesis, accepted this picture of the contrast in settlement forms between eastern and western Britain and. like Seebohm, regarded both 'hamlets and scattered steads' as an expression of 'old Celtic arrangements'. See Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), p. 16.