[1096] Marina, Teoria de las Córtes, P. I, cap. xiii, n. 24 (Madrid, 1820).
The burden of the tithe was the same in France under the ancien régime. As a recent writer remarks “Les dimes étaient une des plus lourdes, peutêtre même celle qui pesait sur les campagnes de la façon la plus générale et la plus fâcheuse ... on ne devrait pas oublier que le droit en lui-même était, le plus souvent, bien moins odieux, moins funeste, que les abus auxquels il donnait lieu ou servait de prétexte.”—Edme Champion, La Séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat en 1794 (Paris, 1903).
The tithes and first fruits were by no means the only ecclesiastical exaction which impoverished the husbandman. An anonymous Presbítero secular who, in 1828, vigorously defended the temporalities of the Church, candidly admits the oppressiveness of some of its revenues. Among those enumerated was one known as Luctuosa—the right to the best head of cattle on the death of the peasant. The lay lords had mostly commuted this for a small money payment, but the clergy farmed it out and the farmers exacted it with the utmost rigor, not only on the death of the head of a family but on that of every member, so that the survivors, in the hour of bereavement, were often stripped of the means of cultivating their holdings. In 1787 the people of the see of Lugo, after a long struggle, obtained from Carlos III a decree restricting it to the death of the head of the family and commuting it to a money payment of sixty reales when four head of cattle were owned and lesser sums for a smaller number.—Historia y Origen de las Rentas de la Iglesia de España, pp. 90-7 (Madrid, 1828).
This exaction was by no means confined to Spain. See Burn’s Law Dictionary s. v. Heriot and Du Cange s. vv. Hereotum, Luctuosa.
[1097] Breve Memoria (Döllinger, Beiträge zur polit. kirchl. u. Cultur-Geschichte, III, 203).
[1098] C. Hispalens. ann. 1512, cap. 13, 17, 23, 26, 27 (Aguirre, T. V).—Barrantes, Aparato para la Hist. de Extremadura, I, 469.
[1099] De justa Hæreticorum punitione, Lib. III, cap. 5.
[1100] Comentarios, fol. 167, 260.
[1101] Archivo de Simancas, Patronato Real, Inq., Leg. único, fol. 76.
[1102] Synod. Oriolan., ann. 1600, cap. xxviii (Aguirre, VI, 457).