340 TITHES 



by the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. But the previous history 

 of the charge renders it difficult to believe that the nation ever by a 

 legislative action endowed parochial churches with the local tithes. 



The Reformation left the parochial organisation untouched. But 

 it made an important change, which greatly embittered objections to 

 the payment of tithes. It alienated a considerable portion of the 

 tithes from religious uses. Rectories, together with the local tithes, 

 might be, and often had been, " appropriated " to a monastery or 

 other religious corporation, which appointed vicars to discharge the 

 religious duties attached to the endowment. Originally the stipend 

 of the vicar was arbitrary. But gradually it was recognised that 

 the person responsible for religious ministrations in the parish ought 

 to have some fixed determinate means of support. This was gener- 

 ally made by endowing the vicarage with land, or by assigning to 

 it some portion of the great tithes, or the whole of the small tithes, 

 or by a combination of all three methods. At the Dissolution of 

 the Monasteries all the rectorial tithes in their possession, which 

 had not been already allocated to the support of vicarages, passed 

 into the hands of the Crown, and were subsequently granted out 

 by letters patent to lay subjects. These lay grantees were called 

 " lay rectors," or " impropriators," in order to distinguish them from 

 the original " appropriates," who were of necessity spiritual persons 

 or ecclesiastical corporations. When the Tithe Commutation Act 

 was passed in 1836, and tithes of produce were commuted into rent- 

 charges, it was found that nearly one-fourth of the annual value 

 had thus been diverted from religious purposes into the hands of 

 laymen. 1 There is strong evidence that the lay impropriators or 

 their lessees, who were generally absentees, and without other 

 interests in the parish, exacted their legal dues with a strictness 

 which was relatively rare among clerical tithe-owners. 



Tithes in themselves, and apart from their incidence, could scarcely 

 be regarded as a legitimate grievance by either owners or occupiers of 

 land, especially as no attack was as yet made on the religious objects 

 to which they were devoted. No landlords could honestly believe 



1 The net annual value of the tithes, after a deduction of 40 per cent, from 

 the gross value, was in 1836 estimated at 4,053,985 6s. 8d. Of this total 

 sum 962,289 15s. were then in the hands of lay impropriators. But this 

 figure does not take into account the large amount of lay tithes which had 

 been, in the course of three centuries, extinguished by purchases on the part 

 of landowners, or bought and given back to the parochial clergy, or restored 

 by those who, like Spelman, considered their retention by laymen a sacrilege. 



