Tithe

Tithe (A.S. teotha; Lat. decima, sc. pars) means etymologically a tenth, historically a tenth part of the titheable produce of the land paid to the clergy. The payment of tithe to the clergy originated in the recognition of a moral and religious duty. The discharge of this acknowledged obligation acquired the force of custom, then received the sanction of ecclesiastical law, and finally passed into the national jurisprudence of England and other Christian countries.

The first recorded instance of the payment of tithe is the offering of Abraham to Melchisedec (Gen. xiv. 20); the second precedent is the vow of Jacob at Bethel (Gen. xxviii. 22). The consecration of a fractional portion of the produce of the land to the uses of the ministers of religion formed part of the Mosaic law. The tribe of Levi were maintained from this source, not having lands assigned to them like the other tribes. Neither patriarchal usage, nor precedents of Mosaic law, nor the Levitical economy were binding on Christians; but they doubtless suggested to the clergy the precept, and to the people the practice, of paying tithes to the ministers of religion. The system is not specially enjoined in the New Testament, and no claim to tithes is urged by the Christian clergy as representatives of the Levitical priesthood. In the enthusiastic bounty of early Christianity voluntary offerings sufficed. Some evidence does exist in the ante-Nicene Fathers that tithes were held to be due under the gospel as well as under the Mosaic law; on the other hand, Selden is possibly right in maintaining that the custom of paying tithe cannot be traced before the 4th century. Whether this be so or not is immaterial. At the end of the 4th century the evidence is overwhelming (Hilary, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine) that the moral and religious duty of paying tithes was recognised, and had acquired the force of custom. As a moral and religious custom the payment of tithes was enjoined by the public acts of councils and churches, and enforced by moral and religious sanctions (e.g. Councils of Tours, 567; Mâcon, 589; Rouen, 650; &c.). The last stage was reached when the state added the civil sanction to the ecclesiastical sanction. In doing so the state recognised the already accepted customary duty, and the corresponding customary rights. It created no new burden; it appropriated no part of what had hitherto been a public fund or public revenue. On the Continent the attachment of legal sanctions to ecclesiastical customs dates from Charlemagne's legislation in 779 and 787. Henceforward tithes were enforced by temporal penalties.

Before Augustine landed in Kent (597), the custom of paying tithes had been enjoined by the public acts of continental councils. As a duty the payment of tithes was preached by the first missionaries; as a custom it was speedily established by their successors. But it was not till 785 that the custom was enjoined by ecclesiastical legislation. In 785 two Italian bishops were sent by Pope Adrian I. to recommend twenty-nine Latin injunctions to the observance of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Among them was one injunction which urged the payment of tithes as a means of securing to the payer the blessing of God. Thus the customary discharge of a recognised religious duty was for the first time enforced in England by the public act of an ecclesiastical council.

This ecclesiastical injunction was subsequently confirmed and extended by royal orders in episcopal councils, in national synods, and in proclamations of peace. But it was not till 970 that the state recognised the customary duty and its corresponding customary right by adding the civil to the ecclesiastical sanction. It is now agreed that the so-called grant of King Offa is an idle story relating to Peter's Pence, and that the so-called grant of King Ethelwulf rests on a misconstruction of a document which has no reference to tithes. No law, no charter, no authentic public document exists by which the state professes to confer the right to tithes upon the church. But the laws of King Edgar (970) attached a legal punishment to neglect of the customary and religious duty of paying tithes, and provided means of enforcing the corresponding customary right by temporal penalties. These laws were subsequently confirmed by successive sovereigns, though it was not till after the Conquest that the payment became general. The process by which tithes grew from a moral into a legal duty does not explain their special allocation as the local endowments of parishes. In their appropriation as part of the parochial system three stages may be distinguished: (1) before 970; (2) from 970 to the end of the 12th century; (3) from 1200 onwards.

(1) Before 970.—During the first three centuries of the Anglo-Saxon Church there was in each diocese one common treasury, into which were paid the tithes and other offerings of the faithful. As to the distribution of these funds by the bishop, different usages prevailed in different parts of western Christendom. In the Roman dioceses the customary division was fourfold: (1) the clergy, (2) the poor, (3) the fabrics of churches, (4) the bishop. In some of the French and Spanish dioceses the division was threefold, the bishop being omitted. What usage prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon Church is unknown. No division, quadripartite or tripartite, was ever enjoined by law or canon in England.

(2) From 970 to end of 12th century.—In this transition period the parochial system grew up, and local appropriations were made to particular churches out of the common fund. Edgar's legislation (970) shows that the parochial system was already growing. His legislation points to the fact that landowners were building churches on their estates for their own and their tenants' benefit, and were endowing them with some portion of the tithe, which they otherwise paid to the diocesan treasury or to the nearest monastic or conventual establishment. It distinguishes three kinds of churches: (1) the mother-church, generally monastic or conventual; (2) churches with burial-grounds attached, in private patronage on the estates of private landowners; (3) churches similarly situated, but without burial-grounds. It recognises the general presumption in favour of paying to the mother-church the tithe of the district which it served, but if there was a church of the second class within the district it was entitled to a portion of the local tithe. In these churches we have the original type of modern parish churches. By degrees they multiplied, and, as they were built, bishops insisted upon their endowment with a portion of the local tithe as a condition of consecration. Districts were attached to them, which were generally contiguous with the estate of the founder, and which became the parish. The same process was going on not only on lay estates, but on the estates of bishops and other ecclesiastical corporations. Thus the parochial system gradually became uniform, and by a series of acts, which in each case were distinct and voluntary on the part of the landowner, the local tithes became appropriated without any legislative enactment to parish churches. No general law, no legislative enactment, effected the endowment; but by express particular grants, of which, in the shape of consecration deeds, several remain to the present day, each church was separately endowed.

(3) From 1200 onwards.—This date makes a dividing line in the growth of the parochial system, because by that time the system was almost universal, and because the legal presumption had arisen that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, the tithes of all titheable produce within the parish belonged of common right to the rector. The decrees of the Lateran Council, 1179–80, made two important steps, according to Selden, towards the growth of the system. Up to that date landowners had been free to pay the tithes as they pleased: they might, and did, 'appropriate' them to churches, monasteries, or capitular bodies; they might 'appropriate' them to themselves or other laymen; they might, and did, sell them to the church for money or other valuable consideration. Out of this power had arisen all the endowments of parish churches and monasteries with tithes which took place between the 10th and 13th centuries. From 1180 onwards no new titles of this kind could be created without the consent of the bishop, and the loss of the power of appropriation, together with the legal presumption in favour of the rector's title, provided for the expansion of the system on stereotyped lines. The other change in 1180 was this. Parish priests were originally nominated and invested by lay patrons. Bishops did not institute; hence when vacancies occurred in manorial parish churches patrons could not be compelled to fill them up. The council decreed the necessity of episcopal institution, and established the right of the bishop to supply vacancies after the lapse of a certain delay. The almost universal establishment of the parochial system, the legal presumption in favour of the rector, the episcopal institution, and the bishop's right to supply vacancies completed the organisation of parishes and provided for present and future appropriations of local tithes to parish churches.

Rectories together with tithes might be 'appropriated' to monastic or nonparochial corporations. The appropriators performed their duties by vicars. At the dissolution of the monasteries the rectorial tithes which had belonged to the dissolved communities passed to the crown, and were from time to time granted out to subjects, who became lay rectors or 'impropriators' as they were called to distinguish them from the original 'appropriators,' who must of necessity have been spiritual. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 provided for the commutation of tithes in England and Wales into a money payment or rent-charge. Though the annual payment varies with the septennial average price of corn, it is fixed in the sense that the amount payable in each year is calculated upon a rent-charge or fixed valuation. The effect of this act is to render the old distinctions between great and small tithes, prædial, mixed, and general tithes, and between the various modes of payment by 'modus' matters of antiquarian knowledge. The value of the tithes commuted in 1836 to tithe rent-charge was at par value £4,053,985, 6s. 8½d. Of this sum £962,289, 15s. 7½d. is payable to lay impropriators, leaving £3,091,695, 11s. 1¼d. for ecclesiastical owners. Of this latter sum £678,987, 1s. 1¼d. is payable to Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The remainder, £2,412,708, 9s. 11½d., is payable to parochial incumbents. At the present values this sum is worth about in round numbers £1,800,000. To this sum may be added about £8000 for extra- ordinary tithe in Kent and Cornwall. In Ireland the settlement was effected by a general commutation of tithe into a money rent-charge, regulated by a valuation of the tithes (one-fourth being deducted for the cost of collection), and payable by the proprietors, who should receive it from the occupiers of the land. By the Irish Church Act, 1869, this rent-charge became vested in the commissioners of church temporalities, with power to sell such rent-charge to the owner of the land charged therewith at twenty-two and a half years' purchase. Power is also given to such purchaser to pay by instalments for fifty-two years, at the rate of $4\backslash frac\{1\}\{2\}$ per cent. on the purchase-money, deducting the estimated charge for poor-rate; the rent-charge being extinguished at the expiration of the fifty-two years. The Extraordinary Tithe Act, 1886, frees lands not at present cultivated as hop-ground, orchard, fruit plantation, or market-garden, from liability to the separate tithe which, under the Act of 1836, could be claimed as extraordinary. It also provides for the redemption of the extraordinary tithe in existence upon the land actually under cultivation. The Tithe Rent Charge Recovery Act of 1891 has not materially affected the principle of the Act of 1836. But instead of the old remedy of distress by the tithe-owner, it substitutes a process through the county court; instead of permitting the tenant to be the conduit-pipe of the landowner's payment, it makes the landowner alone liable; instead of the corn-averages absolutely determining the amount of tithe rent-charge which is payable, provision is made in certain cases for the reduction or the suspension of payment.

In 1891 a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the redemption of tithe rent-charges. The Commission has reported inter alia in favour of the compulsory redemption of tithes up to the value of 40s., of the abolition of the existing minimum of twenty-five years' purchase, of the principle of allowing the parties to make their own bargains subject to the approval of the Board of Agriculture. See TEINDS, ADVOWSON; and works on the history of tithes by Easterby, Jones, Clarke, Lord Selborne (1888), and on the tithe acts by Whalley (1838; new ed. 1883), Bolton (1886), Chambers (1891), Studd (1891), and Thring (1891).