THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF OLD PLYMOUTH. 323 
lords of manors began to build churches upon their demesnes or 
wastes, in order to accommodate their tenants in one or two ad- 
joining lordships, and that they might have divine service regularly 
performed therein, they obliged their tenants to appropriate their 
tithes to the maintenance of the one officiating minister, instead of 
leaving them at liberty to distribute them amongst the clergy of 
the diocese generally. The tract of land, large or small, the tithes 
of which were thus appropriated, formed a distinct parish, a cir- 
cumstance which accounts for the frequent intermixture of one 
parish with another. For if the lord of the manor had a parcel 
of land detached from the main part of his estate, it was natural, 
if it was not sufficient to form a parish of itself, for him to endow 
the newly- erected church with the tithes of such land. 
But this does not throw any light upon the question, as to 
whether parishes were originally formed for ecclesiastical or civil 
purposes. "We are so accustomed to associate them with matters 
ecclesiastical, that it is almost impossible to understand that they 
could have been formed for any purposes but those connected with 
religion ; but from the early periods I have mentioned and down- 
wards, we find in the records, and in the proceedings of Parliament, 
that parishes are always referred to as the common and known 
divisions of the hundred. Through the parishes, as now, the 
Imperial and other taxes were assessed and collected.* The common 
law also, according to Chief Justice Holt, considers the parish as 
a secular division in the country; for he has laid it down, 
"that the parish was made for the ease and benefit of the 
parishioners, and not of the parson, "f which is, in fact, frequently 
found to be the case by many a parson, who has little benefit and 
less ease in his parish in these times. From the time of Edward 
the First, we find the parish made use of as a convenient division 
for raising soldiers, and for other purposes connected with state 
affairs. Every parish in the reign of the second Edward was re- 
quired to furnish one foot soldier equipped and armed for sixty days. 
And Parliament is expressly declared to have granted that in every 
parish in the kingdom the four men and the provost, who had 
already been named in another relation, should be answerable for 
one man at arms. J 
But although it is clear that the parish was thus used as a con- 
* Toulmin Smith; "The Parish," p. 10. t " Salkeld," vol. iii. p. 88. 
I Toulmin Smith, p. 18. 
