So far the conclusions drawn from the laws respecting the leysing do not vary much from the views expounded by Dr. Konrad von Maurer in his ‘Die Freigelassenen nach altnorwegischem Rechte,’ and confirmed by so great an authority they can hardly have wandered very far from the truth.
The theory of this gradual growth of the kindred of the leysing is so nearly analogous to that of the Cymric alltud, and the Irish fuidhir, and at the same time so logical, when the tribal theory of blood-relationship is applied to it, that we cannot be dealing with the fanciful theory of legal enthusiasts which never had an actual place in practical life. Behind all this imperfect description, in the laws, of social conditions and landholding there was, no doubt, a reality, the features of which may be difficult to grasp from our modern point of view, but which become, I think, fairly intelligible when approached from a tribal point of view.
[Sidenote: The leysings have become a family group, and the descendants of the master also.]
When we consider that in the course of the successive generations, during which some kind of shadowy lordship seems to have prevailed over the family of leysings, they must generally have multiplied into considerable numbers, and that the descendants of the master of the leysing ‘who made freedom ale’ must during the same period also have multiplied; and further when we consider that the descendants of the leysing were in some sense, it would seem, _adscripti glebæ_, we have to recognise not merely a relation between individuals but something approaching to a relation between two classes, tribesmen and non-tribesmen, the one in some sense in a kind of servitude to the other. In other words, we have to conceive of a kindred of half-free tenants, living under the joint shadowy lordship of a kindred of fully-free men, probably in some tribal sense landowners, with complicated tribal rights among themselves.
It would seem that this semi-subject class of leysings were mostly the descendants of a class of thralls, it may be perhaps in origin some conquered race, members of which had gradually grown into leysings and were now gradually in successive stages growing into freemen.