Selden’s Conclusion on Ethelwulf’s Charter.
“If we well consider the words of the chiefest of these ancients, that is, Ingulphus, we may conjecture that the purpose of the charter was to make a general grant of tithes payable freely and discharged from all kind of exactions used in that time.”[109] Selden is not correct in this conclusion; for if we take the collateral evidence of the chronicles, we shall find that the king’s grant referred to land and not to tithe of increase.
Selden says, “In Matthew of Westminster no other decima is mentioned in it than decima terræ meæ. Out of the corrupted language [of the charter] it is hard to collect what the exact meaning of it was.”[110] Here Selden unquestionably expresses a doubt as to the interpretation of the charter. And we are therefore bound to give him credit as having been the first to doubt Ingulph’s interpretation of the charter; namely, that “Ethelwulf first endowed the whole English Church throughout his kingdom with the tithes of the lands.” Therefore I agree with Lord Selborne that Haddan and Stubbs have not done justice to Selden in not having taken this doubtful statement into consideration.[111]
CHAPTER VIII.
TITHE LAWS MADE BY ANGLO-SAXON KINGS.
Prideaux says: “For King Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, about thirty years afterwards (885), having published a body of laws for the well government of the realm, in one of them strictly enjoins the payment of these tithes to the Church.”[112] He quotes as his authority for this statement, Spelman’s “Concilia,” tome i. p. 360, No. 38: “Decimas, primigenia, et adulta tua Deo dato.” This is the Vulgate translation of the Saxon. Thorpe translates the Saxon thus: “Thy tithes and thy firstfruits of moving and growing things, render thou to God.”[113]
It is important to note that King Alfred placed a long Scriptural preface to his secular laws. He began with the ten commandments, translated and transposed them in a strange manner. It is all in Anglo-Saxon, which Alfred had translated from the Vulgate which they taught him at Rome when there in his younger days. The passage quoted from Spelman is taken from Exodus xxii. 29, and this is in Alfred’s Scriptural preface to his laws. The Vulgate translation is, “Decimas tuas et primitias tuas non tardabis reddere.” [“Thou shalt not delay to give thy tithes and firstfruits.”] The renderings of this passage in the Septuagint, Vulgate, and English Bible, are paraphrases and not translations of the Hebrew text. For example, “Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits and of thy liquors.”[114] Again, “Thou shalt not delay to offer from thy abundance and of thy liquors.”[115]
This passage in his preface was not one of his laws on tithes, as Prideaux states. “In King Alfred’s laws,” says Lord Selborne, “there is nothing about tithes. He made a treaty of peace with Guthrum; in that treaty there was nothing about tithes.”[116] I quote his lordship because recently the Rev. M. Fuller has dedicated “Our Title Deeds” to him. Should his lordship take the trouble to read through that book, he would be astonished at some of the statements made in it; e.g., Mr. Fuller says that King Ethelbert of Kent passed laws for the payment of tithes, and that King Alfred passed a law for their payment, quoting, of course, for the second case, Dean Prideaux, who has misled so many on the subject of tithes. “In a code of laws,” says Mr. Fuller, “published during Alfred’s reign, he in one of them strictly enjoins the payment of these tithes to the Church.”[117] And adds, “In this Digest of the laws of his predecessors, Alfred made not a new law for tithes; he merely copied from them whose laws have long since been lost.”[118] Now, the only reference to tithes in Alfred’s laws is the above quotation, which he made in his preface from the Vulgate translation of Exodus xxii. 29.
“No legislative enactment,” says Mr. Kemble, “can be shown on the subject of tithes in the codes of Alfred, Ini, or the Kentish kings.”[119]
“It is not easy to say,” says Johnson, “with what view Alfred put this Scriptural preface to his laws, if it were not to show his great esteem for God’s word. There is no hint given that he expected his people should make the judicial precepts of Moses the rule of their action,”[120] etc.
Again, Mr. Fuller says, “Alfred, with the consent of his Witan, entered into a treaty with Guthrum, by which the former ceded to the latter the provinces of East Anglia and Northumberland upon six conditions, the sixth being, ‘If any man withhold tithes, let him pay lah-slit (a fine of twenty shillings) among the Danes, and wite (a fine of thirty shillings) among the English.’”[121] Those Danes were heathen, and it seems strange that they were compelled to pay tithes to the Christian Churches. But this treaty was not concluded between Alfred and Guthrum I., but between his son Edward and a Guthrum II. “Our Title Deeds” must have been very loosely prepared. The rubric to this law states, “This is the ordinance which King Alfred and King Guthrum, and afterwards King Edward and King Guthrum, chose and ordained.”[122] “The rubrics to these laws,” says Mr. Thorpe, “are very defective in the manuscripts.”[123] “The party,” adds Mr. Thorpe, “to this treaty with Edward was apparently a second Guthrum, who, according to Wallingford, was living in Edward’s time, and probably succeeded Eohric, the immediate successor of Guthrum I.”[124] Edward the Elder succeeded his father in 901, and died in 924. The treaty was made in 907. Guthrum I. received East Anglia and Northumberland in 880, and died in 891.
Selden says, “It may be seen by this that some other law preceded for the payment of tithes, or else that the right of them was otherwise supposed clear.”[125] There may have been some previous secular law which is now lost. As I have stated before, we have lost most valuable Anglo-Saxon charters and laws during the incursions of the Danes and the disturbed state of the whole country. There is a dead silence as regards tithes for 120 years between the Council of Chelsea, A.D. 787, and the treaty between Edward and Guthrum, A.D. 909. “What we now possess,” says Thorpe, “of Anglo-Saxon laws is but a portion of what once existed.”[126]