A HISTORY OF TITHES A HISTORY OF TITHES BY THE REV. HENRY WILLIAM CLARKE, B.A. TRIN. COLL., DUB. _Author of “The Past and Present Revenues of the Church of England in Wales,” and “The Public Landed Endowments of the Church in Anglo-Saxon Times.”_ SECOND EDITION [Illustration] London SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1894 PREFACE. In my former[1] as also in my present work, I have taken Selden’s “History of Tithes,” ed. 1618, as my chief authority. I adopted his views on the interpretation of King Ethelwulf’s charter as having been the first legal title deeds of granting tithes to the clergy. After carefully consulting the best authorities, especially Mr. Kemble, Mr. Haddan, and Bishop Stubbs, I have in my present work adopted their views, that Ethelwulf granted a tenth part of his lands and not the tithes of the lands of his kingdom. I have also considered Archbishop Egbert’s alleged canon for the tripartite division of tithes as an anachronism. In preparing my former work, I laboured under the great disadvantage of residing too far away from a good public library, where I could consult the best and most recent authorities on the subject. Just as the sheets of my former work passed through the press, a third edition of Lord Selborne’s work, “A Defence of the Church of England against Disestablishment,” was published. And in the following year, 1888, appeared his “Ancient Facts and Fictions concerning Churches and Tithes.” I could only then refer in the briefest manner in my former book to his first work. But his two works contain so many erroneous and fallacious statements, that I thought it a public duty to expose and refute them. With this view and in order to prepare materials, I had taken steps to have access to the Library and to the manuscripts in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum. I had not gone far with my work when I found it absolutely necessary to _rewrite_ the whole of my “History of Tithes,” and to make the present work, as it really is, _quite a new one_. I had not only to deal with Lord Selborne’s works, but also with historians, who wrote private letters to parsons against the threefold division of tithes, which letters contradicted statements made in their own histories which favoured the tripartite division of tithes, and the Church Grith law of A.D. 1014. The tithe disputes in Wales brought forward crude, erroneous, misleading and ill-digested statements about the origin and history of tithes in this country. “Our Title Deeds,” by the Rev. M. Fuller, is a most remarkable specimen of that class.