[Sidenote: The new rules to amend tribal custom show what it once was. Thus the Scanian laws throw light on Norse odal holdings. They were family holdings.]
These and other innovations may have been the result of a new sense of justice brought in with Christianity or under the influence of Roman law. The question for us is the meaning of the ancient custom. And we are brought back to the point that in so far as the family group more or less may have resembled the Cymric gwely, and is approached from this point of view, it must be regarded as the group of descendants of a common grandfather or great-grandfather, who is, in the Archbishop’s phrase, the _paterfamilias_. While he is alive the landed rights are vested in him. On his death his sons take his place with divided or undivided equal shares, but still as the representative members of the original gwely or family group. One of them dies, and the question is whether the surviving brothers ‘of the prior grade’ are to promote into this grade at once the sons of their deceased brother. Such a course might naturally be regarded as preferring these nephews to their own sons. The rights of all the members of the ‘lower grade’ will come in time when all of the ‘prior grade’ are gone and the grandsons share equally _per capita_ in the family property. In the meantime the sons of deceased parents, like those whose fathers are alive, must wait. So it may have been under ancient custom. But in course of time family ties weaken and individual rights grow stronger in national feeling, as we have seen them everywhere doing. And then little by little compromises are made. The joint property of husband and wife, even if not properly ‘defined,’ is recognised in the Scanian law as belonging to the sons of the marriage to the very limited extent that they may have equal shares with the other _consortes_ whether uncles or cousins. The sons of the deceased brother when the grandfather is dead and division among the brothers comes in question are allowed by the clause in the Gulathing law to buy back their father’s share in the odal at a fifth less than its value instead of sharing in it as family property.
So far the clauses in the Scanian and Gulathing laws considered together seem to throw light upon the traditional principle on which the rights of the odal-sharers of the Norse laws may have been founded.