114 History of the English Landed Interest. 



Nonconformist was almost omnipotent ; and again, in the 

 days of James 11., when Romanism w-as once more to the 

 fore. Surely therefore the tithe rent charge is something 

 more than private, though something less than public property, 

 the incidence of which is alterable by the State, as altered it 

 was in 967, 1836, and 1891, but the existence of which the 

 State has ever upheld. The State therefore, in its position to 

 the tithe, is a trustee, but a trustee bound by no laws save 

 those of her own making. If therefore she chose to provide 

 a substitute for the present tithe payment, just as she might 

 choose to formulate a scheme of national insurance in substi- 

 tution of the present poor laws, so long as she supplied the 

 National Church with an equivalent income from other sources, 

 there seems to be no occasion for an outcry on the part of those 

 to whom the present tithe-charge is now payable. 



"We have said that the intentions of the original tithe donor 

 were to support the Establishment known as the English 

 Church ; but the distribution of his offering both here and on 

 the Continent w^as carefully defined from the very outset. It 

 is a disputed point whether the quadripartite, or even the 

 tripartite distribution ever obtained a foothold in this country. 

 For the researches of Lord Selborne have in every impartial 

 mind fully established that there is no really reliable evidence 

 on the subject in all the Anglo-Saxon literature. There are, 

 it is true, allusions to tithe partition, but all of a doubtful 

 nature. There are first of all the suggestions contained in 

 Pope Gregory's reply to St. Augustine ; there is the clause in 

 the Church Grith Law at the end of the reign of Ethelred the 

 Unready, and there are the allusions in certain canons of the 

 English Episcopate. But Lord Selborne refuses to believe that, 

 even after granting the Church Grith Law of 1014 to be 

 genuine, it was ever carried out, since there was no confirma- 

 tion of it by Canute, who succeeded Ethelred the following 

 year. It was therefore no more likely to have established 

 compulsory tripartite distribution in this country than that 

 earlier suggestion of Pope Gregory's. The third source of 

 evidence, viz., the references contained in the canonical laws, 

 has been traced by this same author to one original source, 

 viz., the Ca^itulare Episcojwrum. 



