A history of tithes

by Henry William Clarke

Population.

Mr. Walter de Gray Birch, of the MSS. Department of the British Museum, had discovered in 1883, in the British Museum, a MS. in Anglo-Saxon of the late tenth or early eleventh century. It is the only extant Anglo-Saxon copy. It is the oldest and best text. There is internal evidence that the MS. is a copy of an older one now lost. It is in the Harley Collection of MSS. 3271 f. 6B. It is the earliest census return of the Anglo-Saxon population.[171] There are thirty-four divisions or territorial names which are very ancient. The total is 243,600 hides, which mean families, throughout England. Allowing five to each family, the population of England in A.D. 1066 was 1,218,000. As the sanitary arrangements and medical science were little known among the Anglo-Saxons, I take 10 per 1,000 as the excess of births over deaths. From these data I conclude that in A.D. 597, when Augustine landed in England, the population was 80,000; in A.D. 700, the population was 160,000; in A.D. 800, population 300,000; in A.D. 900, population 600,000; in A.D. 1,000, population 900,000. The population of Kent in A.D. 597 was about 5,500. There is a statement in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that the population of Kent was 10,000 when Augustine landed, but this was an exaggeration. There were then 21 monasteries in England. Between A.D. 600 and 700, 100 monasteries were built and endowed. Therefore in A.D. 700 there were 121 monasteries for a population of 160,000. Only 29 monasteries were built between 700 and 800, 22 between 800 and 900, 38 between 900 and 1000, and 43 between 1000 and 1066, or 253, but one-half of them were in ruins through Danish invasions, at the time of the Conquest.

I shall now give the population of the country at the periods when tithes were ordered to be paid by civil or ecclesiastical law.

In 787, when the Pope’s two legates came to England, the population was about 260,000. The Injunctions read to the Northern Synod were attested by the King of Northumberland, Archbishop of York, Bishops of Hexham, Lindisfarne, Whitherne, Mayo in Ireland, Ethelwin of Bangor, two dukes, two abbots, some presbyters, deacons and thanes.

In the Southern Synod they were attested by the King of Mercia, Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishops of Lichfield, Lindsey, Leicester, Elmham, London, Winchester, Dunwich, Hereford, Selsey, Rochester, Sherborne, Worcester (13 bishops); 3 abbots, 3 dukes, and 1 comes, i.e. 16 ecclesiastics and 5 laymen.

It will be seen from these facts that not only was the population small, but ecclesiastics formed the majority in the synods or councils who framed laws and canons for the payment of tithes to the Church. King Athelstan’s law made in 927 for the payment of tithes runs thus:—

“Athelstan, king, with the council of Wulfhelm Archbishop, and of my other bishops, make known to the reeves, etc.” Here is the King with a council of bishops making a law for the payment of tithes to bishops themselves and to their clergy. And this is considered the first general law in England for setting forth the payment of predial and mixed tithes. The population then was about 700,000.

In 960, King Edgar passed his tithe laws with and by the advice of his Witan, who included the Archbishop of Canterbury, and bishops. The population then was about 800,000.

Let us now take a glance at the number of bishops in England and Wales up to the time of the Norman Conquest.

Kent had Canterbury and Rochester.

East Saxons: London. East Angles: Dunwich and Elmham.

West Saxons: Dorchester (transferred to Winchester), Sherborne, Mercia (including eight counties), Lichfield, Leicester, Sidnacester (or Lindsey), Worcester, Hereford.

South Saxons: Selsey.

Northumberland: York, Lindisfarne, Hexham.

Sixteen bishops in England and 4 in Wales in A.D. 705, when the population was only 160,000, i.e. a bishop for every 8,000. By absorption only 14 bishops in England, 4 in Wales, and 1 in the Isle of Man in 1066, or one bishop for every 66,000 of the population.

Lord Selborne, Bishop Stubbs, and Mr. Haddan[172] say the manorial churches, to which Edgar’s laws granted one-third of the tithes, were the type of our own modern parish churches. This I grant. It is the first Act of Parliament by which they received tithes. By custom the mother churches originally received tithes. But it was not by custom, but by an Act of Parliament passed at Andover in A.D. 960, that the type of our modern parishes received one-third of the tithes of the parochial limits.

Up to A.D. 1180, the owners of lands from which tithes arose might give them, as they please, to bishops, chapters, monasteries, or to the parish churches on their own estates. Hence, churches erected by landowners after 960 received in many cases, up to 1180, all the tithes of the new parochial boundaries, and not one-third.

But I disagree with them in limiting the origin of the type of our modern parishes to A.D. 960. I trace the germ of our modern parishes back to the two earls’ churches, consecrated in A.D. 686.[173] Soames, Lappenberg, and Dean Hook refer the origin of our modern parishes to Archbishop Theodore (668 to 693). That Bede’s churches were in the north of England does not militate against my view. It was but the germ, which gradually expanded.[174]

CHAPTER X.
THE LAWS OF ETHELRED II.

The following nine laws appear in Thorpe’s “Ancient Laws,” etc.[175]

I. Council of Woodstock. Thorpe takes his text from Cott. Titus, A. 27. The MS. is of the thirteenth century, and contains perhaps the best text extant of the old Latin version of the Saxon laws. Wilkins has it among his “Saxon Laws,” but omits it in his “Concilia.” Bromton also has it.

II. The Treaty with the Norwegian Kings, viz., Anlaf, Justin, and Guthmund. Thorpe prints his text from the above MS. Bromton has it Wilkins has it in his “Laws,” but not in his “Concilia.”

III. The Council at Wantage (A.D. 997). Thorpe prints it from the above. Bromton has it. Wilkins has it in his “Laws.”

IV. De Institutis Londoniæ (prob. A.D. 997). Thorpe prints it from the above, and remarks that it was a most important law as regards the commercial and monetary history of England.

V. Liber Constitutionum (A.D. 1008). Thorpe prints it from Cott. Nero, A. 1. Wilkins has it in his “Laws,” but not in his “Concilia.” Lord Selborne confounds this with the Ordinances passed at Habam.

VI. Council of Enham (probably “Ensham in Oxfordshire”). Thorpe prints it from a MS. in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 201, which was written apparently in the middle of the eleventh century, and which he collated with Cott. Claud., A. 3. Wilkins has it in his “Laws” and also in his “Concilia.” Spelman dates the council A.D. 1009.

VII. Grith and Mund. Thorpe prints it from Cott. Nero, A. 1, collated with MS. C.C. 201 (Nasmith). “These manuscripts,” says Mr. Thorpe, “closely agree together.” Wilkins has it in his “Laws,” but not in his “Concilia.”

VIII. The Ordinances of Habam (A.D. 1012). Bromton alone gives the text, from which Thorpe copied his text and collated it with the Macro and Holkham manuscripts. Wilkins has printed it in his “Concilia” (i. 295), but not in his “Laws”; Spelman has it (“Concilia,” i. 530).

IX. Church Grith (A.D. 1014). Thorpe prints it from Cott. Nero, A. 1. collated with C.C. 201. He does not state that these manuscripts closely agree together, as he does the two collated in VII. Wilkins has it in his “Laws,” but not in his “Concilia.”

N.B.—VI. VIII. and IX. only are in the volume Nero, A. 1.

Bromton has only I. II. III. VIII.

IX. Church Grith.

Mr. Thorpe takes his text from the so-called Worcester volume of the Cottonian manuscript, Nero, A. 1, fol. 96 b. It begins thus:—

“This is one of the Ordinances which the king of the English composed with the counsel of his Witan, etc.”

Art. 6. “And respecting tithe, the king and his Witan have chosen and decreed, as is just, that one-third part of the tithe which belongs to the Church, go to the reparation of the Church, and a second part to the servants of God, the third to God’s poor and to needy ones in thraldom.”

Art. 7. “And be it known to every Christian man, that he pay to his Lord his tithe justly, always as the plough traverses the tenth field, on peril of God’s mercy, and of the full ‘wite,’ which King Edgar decreed, that is”:—

Art. 8. “If any one will not justly pay the tithe, then let the king’s reeve go, and the mass-priest of the minster, or of the ‘landrica’ (the proprietor of the land, lord of the soil) and the bishop’s reeve and take forcibly the tenth part for the minster to which it is due, and assign to him the ninth part; and let the eight parts be divided into two, and let the landlord take possession of half, half the bishop; be it a king’s man, be it a thane’s.”

Art. 9. “And let every tithe of young be paid by Pentecost, on pain of the ‘wite’; and of earth’s fruit by the equinox or at all events by Allhallow’s Mass.”

“On comparing these articles,” says Lord Selborne, “with King Edgar’s laws, it will be seen that, if enacted, they would have omitted the clause in those laws which authorized the payment of one-third of the local tithes to a manorial church having a burial ground.”[176]

Dr. Lingard says, “But its (Edgar’s) subsequent re-enactment in the reign of Ethelred, and again in the reign of Canute, will justify a suspicion, that in many places its provisions were set at defiance, and in many but very imperfectly enforced.”[177]

Bishop Stubbs’s references to articles 2 and 44, and to the latter part of the sixth of this law prove (1) that he read the whole law of Church Grith in Thorpe’s translation by referring to three articles of this law; (2) that he referred to the third part in this law for the poor and needy in thraldom in support of a certain statement which he made about the poor; (3) that if he thought the law was not genuine or authentic, he would not have quoted from it; (4) and that the very fact of his having quoted from it, proves that he admitted its genuineness. Here are the Bishop’s words: “The case of the really helpless poor was regarded both as a legal and as a religious duty from the very first ages of English Christianity. St. Gregory, in his instructions to Augustine, had reminded him of the duty of a bishop to set apart for the poor, a fourth part of the incomes of his church. In 1342 Archbishop Stratford ordered that in all cases of impropriation a portion of the tithe should be set apart for the relief of the poor. The legislation of the Witenagemóts of Ethelred bore the same mark; a third portion of the tithe that belonged to the church was to go to God’s poor, and to the needy ones in thraldom.”[178]

Dr. Stubbs cannot go behind what he states above in his published history.

Let us now compare this statement with what he has written since he became a bishop. “The tripartite division, never was adopted in England, and that the passages in support of it are either altogether unauthorized, or merely statements of an ideal state of law conformable to the uses of some foreign churches.”[179]

Lord Selborne gives the following extract from a printed letter of Bishop Stubbs to a rural dean of the diocese of Chester, 12th December, 1885: “The claim of the poor on the tithe was a part of the claim of the Church; and, although this claim was never made the subject of an apportionment, tripartite or quadripartite, except in unauthoritative or tentative recommendations, it has never been ignored or disregarded by the Church or Clergy.”[180]

How can Dr. Stubbs reconcile these statements with an actual quotation which he had taken from Ethelred’s law, where the threefold division is stated? It cannot be. Bishop Stubbs and Professor Freeman must be kept strictly to what they have published in their well-known histories until they publicly repudiate what they have written. Private letters which contradict historical statements must be ignored.