Its Connection with C/mrch and State. 1 1 1 



originated by the inconvenience experienced by great seignorial 

 owners in having to travel long distances to the nearest min- 

 ster church. The lords of manors had begun to divert the 

 tithes which they had been paying for the support of the great 

 monasteries and collegiate churches to the costs of erection and 

 maintenance of local chapels on their own lands ; and King 

 Edgar's laws gave legal sanction to the practice, but at the 

 same time regulated and apportioned the distribution of the 

 funds derived from this source. Thus, if the tithe-payer had 

 no chapel of his own he was not allowed to withhold any por- 

 tion of this due from the mother Church. If he possessed a 

 private chapel but no graveyard, he might appropriate one- 

 tenth towards its expenses ; and in the event of his having 

 provided both church and yard he was allowed to retain as 

 much as one-third.^ Any violation of these regulations enabled 

 the king's reve, bishop of the diocese, and minister of the 

 parish to levy a distress, the proceeds of which was distributed 

 one-tenth to the Church, four-tenths to the lord of the manor, 

 four-tenths to the bishop, and the remaining tenth to the 

 owner. This law was re-enacted in the reigns of Ethelred and 

 Canute, with additional penalties. At first these rural churches 

 were mere wooden chapels dependent upon the mother Church 

 and served by itinerant ministers who gradually acquired the 

 privileges to baptize and bury and eventually became resident. 

 Suchis briefly the history of the tithe in the England of Anglo- 

 Saxon times. Whether this charge on the land's produce was 

 enforced with pains and penalties on owners of real property 

 by the civil laws of the Witan, or whether it was binding on 

 men's consciences by the ecclesiastical canons of the synods, or 

 even whether it was merely a custom amongst the devout, 

 urged thereto by royal example, and coming under the category 

 of what is called in the Roman theology " the counsel of per- 

 fection " it is not here our purpose to inquire. As landowner 

 after landowner charged his estates with a tithe of their pro- 

 duce the practice widened, and as property became hereditary 

 the lands descended from father to son subject to this burden, 

 and it matters little to a history of the landed interest how 



' Id., Ibid. 



