'Three arts which a taeog is not to teach to his son without the permission of his lord: scholarship, smithcraft, and bardism: for if the lord be passive until the tonsure be performed on the scholar; or until the smith enter his smithy; or until a bard be graduated in song,—he cannot afterwards enslave them,' proving that the smith was a freeman.
The trinal, or tripartite, system was sometimes curiously applied:—'There are three fires, kindled by a person on his own land, which are not cognizable in law: the fire of heath-burning, from the middle of March to the middle of April; the fire of a hamlet kiln; and the fire of a hamlet smithy, that shall be nine paces from the hamlet, and having either a covering of broom or of sod thereon.'[1]
In these laws we find the smith and his craft, horse-shoes, and horses, remarkably mixed up in those triads that seem to be so strangely related to the symbolism of the ancient world:—the mystic number 3, the pyramid, triangle, the basis of the mysterious ogive; the number that was considered holy at the first dawn of civilization, that is found wherever variety is developed, and that meets us everywhere. The Welsh laws afford us a striking instance of the influence of this wonderful numeral. 'Three things for which, if found on a road, no one is bound to answer (or be responsible for taking possession of): a horse-shoe (pedol), a needle, and a penny.' 'There are three one-footed animals: a horse, a hawk, and a
legs of the oxen and kine obtained by his information, to make boots to the height of his ankles.'
- ↑ Book ii. chap. 8.
