"Not, however, until upwards of three centuries subsequent to the last mentioned date, does the name of tithes occur in the ecclesiastical history of England. St. Austin, the apostle of the Anglo-Saxons, in his first interrogatory to Pope Gregory, about the year 600, hereinafter more particularly stated, speaks only of oblations without reference to any standard by which they were collected. In 750, perhaps, the first authentic regulation as to tithes, occurs in the 5th canon of Egbert, Bishop of York. In 794, Offa made a law, or rather promulgated a recommendation, for the giving of tithes to the church within his dominion of Mercia. In 855, at the Council of Winchester, King Ethelwulph, having returned, with his son Alfred, from a pilgrimage to Rome, is said to have endowed the church of England with the tithes of all lands, and of all goods or chattels. On examin ing the charter, however, all I think that can be certainly gathered from its obscurity is, that the king exempted certain landed possessions of the church from secular exactions, and particularly from the 'trinoda necessitas,' military service, building of bridges, and fortifying castles.* In the year 900, in the treaty which took place between Edward the Elder and the Danish King Guthrum, when it became necessary to provide for the Christian ministers, particular stipulations were made for the due payment of tithes to them;+ and further regulations for rendering them were prescribed in the constitutions of Odo, in 943, again at the Council of London, in 944, and in 967, under king Edgar. (See Wilkins's Concilia.) "But although their observance was thus strongly recommended to the pious, they do not appear to have been for a long period of time allocated to the respective parishes within which they accrued. This clerical division, when first struck out, about the seventh century in England, was only designed to mark the circuit, within which a priest was to hold his confessions; but the profits of the voluntary oblations or tithes of every diocese were made up in a common treasury for the proper objects within that diocese. From this arrangement, it followed, that it was not material at what church any contributor offered his christian bounty, provided he gave it within the diocese; a practice thoroughly consonant to what is found to be the usage of other churches in the primitive time. In 970, however, king Edgar ordered that tithes should be paid by each person to the church which he frequented, unless where an individual had himself founded and endowed a religious house. In all other instances the royal order recommends that tithes should be given to the parish church. Dentur omnes decimæ primariæ ecclesiæ ad quam parochia pertinet.' The above express limitation of tithes to the church which each frequented, at a period when the Danes were yet numerous in the island, seems to have been framed in the spirit of the Mosaic command ment. "The Leges Anglo-Saxonica' furnish numerous other instances of directions for the payment of tithes; but up to the year 1032, the titheable matters appear to have been restricted, in further conformity * Wilkins's Concilia, v. i. p. 183. Wilkins's Leges Angl. Sax. p. 52. ‡ Selden on Tithes, p. 253. with the rule of the Old Testament to predial tithes. In 1032, however, Edward the Confessor extended the exaction to mixed and personal tithes, and the following matters were on the whole then subjected thereto, viz.: corn, wool, butter, honey, lambs, pigs, the tenth foal, and tenth calf of him who had many, the tenth cheese, or the milk of the tenths day, and the tenth of the profits of mills, meadows, parks, fisheries, gardens, shrubberies, merchandize, &c.* Predial tithes no longer sufficed, nor probably could suffice, in the depressed state of agriculture at that period. The payment, however, was still voluntary, or at least only enforced by clerical process and Domesday Book affords the clearest evidence that the income derivable therefrom, must have even then been subject to great uncertainty. The possessions and revenues of the clergy were required to be there returned, as valued on oath, by inquests taken in every county; but though churches are frequently mentioned, and the lands and villeins appertaining to them, yet very rarely do tithes occur in the enumeration, while the mention of them at all, shews that, where ascertainable, they were an object of political inquiry. "The payment of tithes in England was still further advocated by canon law in 1138, in 1220, in 1222, at the council of Oxford, in 1237, 1239, 1328, &c., but still only with the sanction of ecclesiastical censures. (See Wilkins's Concilia.) "Ireland, I do not think, had even up to the twelfth century volunteered, or was otherwise subjected to the payment of tithes, although Jocelin, a monk of Furnes, in Lancashire, and a biographer of St. Patrick, writing in the twelfth century, insists that our apostle had enjoined them.† I have no doubt that in this country the bishops and clergy were, up to the period now under review, entirely supported by voluntary oblations, mortuaries, and offerings, or by an endowment of lands. The former were either presented by the liberality of the people, as in the instance of Mellefont Abbey, &c., at the time of consecrating the particular church, or were collected in circuits. and visitations by the prelate of the district, or principal of the religious house. The latter species of revenue will be adverted to hereafter. The prelate of Armagh used likewise to receive certain peculiar dues, according to the regulations of what was termed the law of St. Patrick; for, although there were no archbishops in Ireland, from his time to that of Cardinal Paparo, yet the Bishop of Armagh received peculiar honour as the successor of Ireland's apostle. "The predatory incursions and atrocities of the Danes, while exercised over Ireland in the eighth and ninth centuries, must have caused a considerable defalcation in the payment of tithes, if they ever had been previously adopted in this country; and even oblations came in but tardily to the ministers of religion. On the one side, we find St. Bernard, who was the contemporary and Biographer of Malachy, Bishop of Down, recording that the natives of that district in his time (1124) were Christians by name, but Pagans in reality; and as an evidence thereof, that they neither paid tithes nor first fruits, 'non *Wilkins's Concilia, v. i. p. 311. + Trias Thaumat, p. 103. decimas non primitias dare." On the other, it is recorded that in 835, voluntary oblations were collected, by the Bishop of Armagh, in Connaught. In 1106, the prelate of the same see collected similar offerings in Munster. In 1150, Gelasius, the first Archbishop of Armagh, made what is termed the customary visitation of his diocese, ut pro more,' in which he collected supplies of cattle from the princes and nobles; and in the same and subsequent year, the Bishop or Abbot of Derry made similar circuits to collect funds for the repairs of his church. + "At length, in 1152, at the synod of Kells, Cardinal Paparo, presiding as the Pope's legate, distributed the archiepiscopal palls, and amongst several points of discipline, which appear to me to have been then first introduced into Ireland with the authority of the Pope, ordained that tithes should be thenceforth paid by the faithful; in truth it appears to have been one of the grand objects of his mission. Even, however, under this sanction, the mandate was but ill obeyed; and it is certain that tithes were, if at all, but little exacted in Ireland, until long after the establishment of English power, and even then only as matters of ecclesiastical cognizance and enforcement. There are also abundant evidences that in Ireland, as in England, the chiefs and thanes who founded churches reserved to themselves the available tithes of the parish, or certain portions thereof, without any recognition of clerical rights thereto. An obvious testimony of this practice is suggested by a charter from Dermot Mac Murrough to the monastery of All Saints, near Dublin, wherein he affects to grant to them certain lands, together with the villeins thereon, exempt from any charge of tithe-(sine aliquâ decimarum exactione); and at a later date we find De Courcy (in 1183) giving every tenth animal in his farms to the abbey of Down, excepting the Ardes. Cambrensis expressly says, that the Irish people did not pay tithes in his time (1184), and he also, like St. Bernard, gives it as a criterion of their uncivilized state, 'nondum enim decimas vel primitias solvunt.' However correct I believe Giraldus to have been in the fact on which he founded this inferential evidence of barbarism, I must, for the sake of my country, caution the reader against the universal spirit that pervades his works. He visited this country as the instructor of Prince (afterwards King) John, and continued in the island for nearly two years, during which he made many observations that are necessarily very curious at this day, but must, nevertheless, be received with great caution. It should not be forgotten that he came over the advocate of English dominion and Roman discipline; that without the facilities of a native, or even a long resident, and with a total ignorance, if not a contempt, for the language of the country, he assumed to describe its general nature, customs, and habits, from an observation of that very limited part of the kingdom which the English adventurers then fearfully ventured to traverse. Conscious as he must have been of his own deficiencies, he tries to supply the want of diligence by diffuseness, and that of material by ill-timed enco * Messing. Florileg. p. 357. ↑ Trias Thaumat, pp. 306, 504. miums on the fellow-labourers of his mission; or, what is still less excusable, by retailing the miracles, traditions, and calumnies, which the idle attendants of his royal pupil's boy-court manufactured for his credulous and superstitious ear. The appeals of truth have in many instances compelled him to retract his assertions, and, in a word, he can scarcely be relied on with any confidence, except where his praises of Ireland, or its people, may be more forcibly appealed to as the confessions of an adversary. "Nevertheless, whatever might have been the previous usage in Ireland, in 1172, at the council of Cashel, particular provision was made for the payment of the tithes of animals, fruits, and other profits to the parish church. 'Quod universi fideles Christi decimas animalium, frugum, cæterarumque proventuum ecclesiæ cujus fuerint parochiani persolvant.* That the Irish, however, as properly so called, did not pay much attention to the ordinances of an assembly, constituted as was that convened at Cashel, and that they only submitted to it, as their lands became subjected to the English adventurers, can be established by various charters and ancient records; e. g. the grant, in 1176, to William Le Brun, of the tithes of Killester, in the county of Dublin, and the tithes of all other lands he might acquire + and that the English themselves did not respect it as to paying tithes within the parishes, is evinced by the numerous appropriations thereof to particular favourite establishments, which occur in Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. "In 1186, one of the canons of Archbishop Comyn's synod, held in Dublin, provides that tithes shall be paid to the mother churches, i. e. parish or baptismal churches, out of provisions, hay, the young of animals, flax, wool, gardens, orchards, and out of all things that grow and renew yearly, under pain of an anathema, after the third monition. "Even this fulmination failed in its effect; the archbishop's anathema was unheeded by the tithe-payers, the more especially as Prince John himself, in one year after, set the example of disobedience, by various appropriations of tithes to the monastery of the Blessed Virgin. The practice continued during the thirteenth century, and such grants became indeed so arbitrary, that the proprietors of the soil not only sometimes gave all the tithes to one monastery, divided them between two, or even appropriated them in three parts according to their pleasure, and without any reference to propinquity, but even not unfrequently consecrated or assigned the revenues of an Irish parish or district to an English, or even to an alien priory; a circumstance that I cannot but remark, though too frequently overlooked, should, in ecclesiastical cases, be particularly attended to, as the consideration of the class to which each abbey and its possessions appertained, is of the highest legal importance in all such questions. All claims of exemption from tithe, all prescriptive moduses, all compositions Hib. Expugn. lib. 1. c. 34. VOL. 1. NO. HII. † Reg. Christ Church. real, the right of presentations, and even the titles to estates derived through abbeys, must be deeply affected by it. "In England the right to endow monasteries or parish churches with tithes ad libitum,' was claimed as the prerogative of every baron; nor did the reasoning of the English chiefs in Ireland lead to a different conclusion. They considered, with some colour of justice, that it would be against reason, if a man could not grant his alms to whomsoever he would.'+ "Arbitrary consecrations of tithes were, however, felt to be such a grievance and source of controversy, that in 1200, Pope Innocent, by a decretal letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, enjoined that they should thenceforth be paid, under pain of ecclesiastical censure, to the churches of the respective parishes in which the lands chargeable were situated; and although this epistle could not bind English subjects, it yet received further sanction at the council of Lateran, in 1215, and by obedience and acquiescence, silently mingled in the Lex terræ of the sister island. Appropriations theretofore made were especially protected, but any future such ceased to be allowed. In evidence of this admitted practice, we find in a controversy that occurred in England, in 1265, concerning the right to tithes, between a rector and a certain monastic house, the only title adduced in court to establish the minister's right was, that the land in which they grew lay within his parish, infra limites parochiæ suæ.' "Yet, in Ireland there is abundance of evidence that tithes continued to be but very partially offered as a measure of oblations, and that still only within the Pale. In 1227, in consequence of the exility of the revenue arising from this source in the northern archdiocese, the Archbishop of Armagh was obliged to hold a synod at Drogheda, for the sole purpose of settling stipends on the vicars of his province. In 1228, a record very fully enumerates the possessions of the see of Glendaloch, in lands, ineadows, woods, &c., as also, in alms and oblations, but no notice whatever is taken of tithes as a productive revenue in that district.§ Even within the express jurisdiction of the English government, in the pale, the landowners used to withhold their tithes, until commanded by a royal order to discharge them. The latter position is evidenced by a document, which further establishes a curious fact, that the abbots of monastic establishments used to offer some tithes, as those of fish from their weirs, to the parish churches. There are also extant the acts of a syhod of the clergy of Ferns, held in 1240, in which it is urged that tithes of all goods ought, by divine law, to be paid, but that the church was defrauded by their being given as oblations, not as tithes. It, therefore, enjoins that they should be rightly paid in Ferns, as they were in the diocese of Dublin, under pain of ecclesiastical censures. Yet, even in the said diocese of Dublin, about that very time, several persons were excommunicated for their resistance to the payment of tithes. * Selden on Tithes, p. 360. &c. + Eagle on Tithes, vol. 1. p. lx. ✰ M.S. in British Museum The Rolls of Parliament present various similar assertions of right, during the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. Harris's MSS. v. i. p. 124. Id. v. i. p. 127. ¶ Wilkins's Concilia, v. i. p. 681-2. |