WELSH TRIADS. 269 



'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.' 



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 develo]:)ed, 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. 



