ORIGINALLY A FREE-WILL OFFERING 333 



clear gain of the labour of man had early fallen into disuse. Manu- 

 facturers were never liable for the payment, which only survived in 

 such forms as a tenth of the fisherman's catch, or a tenth of the 

 miller's clear profits on meal ground in all but ancient mills. 

 Another classification, distinguished between great and small tithes 

 according to the nature of the produce on which they fell. Thus 

 great or rectorial tithes included corn, beans, peas, hay, and wood ; 

 all the other predial tithes, together with all mixed tithes, were 

 small or vicarial. 



The legal obligation to pay tithes, as distinct from the older moral 

 duty of giving them, dates back to a remote period of history. No 

 real dispute arises respecting their origin, until the point is reached 

 where the offering passed from a free-will gift into a liability enforced 

 by legal penalties. From the fourth century onwards, throughout 

 the Christian world, the practice of dedicating fractional parts of 

 produce to religious objects was recognised by the faithful as a moral 

 duty. As a matter of conscience, the gift was enjoined by Councils 

 of the Western Church, and enforced by appeals to the rewards 

 and punishments of religion. Thus the practice gradually acquired 

 something of the binding force of custom. The final stage was 

 reached when the State recognised as a civil duty the religious 

 practice of giving tithes, and compelled payment, not by appeals to 

 conscience, nor even by spiritual penalties, but by temporal sanctions. 

 This last step, by which tithes passed from moral obligations into 

 legal liabilities, was taken at different dates by the different countries 

 of Christian Europe. 



Before the landing of Augustine in England (597), and before the 

 introduction of Christianity into this country, the moral duty of 

 giving tithes had been enjoined on the Continent by at least one 

 Church Council. As a matter of conscience, therefore, the first 

 missionaries to Anglo-Saxon England preached the consecration of 

 a tenth of produce to the service of God, and as a religious custom 

 the practice was established by their successors among their Chris- 

 tian followers. The appeal was the more forcible since it came 

 from men who were believed to hold the keys of heaven and of hell. 

 But there were as yet no divisions into parishes, no parish churches, 

 no parochial clergy, and no parochial endowments. The cathedral, 

 monastery, and "mother church," generally conventual, of the local- 

 ity, were mission centres, from which radiated itinerant missioners, 

 who preached under rude crosses the rudiments of Christianity 



