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]