their own personal use, and this misappropriation has been going on at least 500 years, which gives them a prescriptive right to all the tithes. I have already sketched out how this misappropriation commenced, and the inability of the poor to obtain redress. The following extract, taken from one of the charters granting tithes to monasteries, indicates how tithes were given:— CHARTER OF EARL RANDULPH GERNONS OF CHESTER TO THE MONASTERY OF CHESTER. “Universitati vestræ notum facio me dedisse _in elemosina in perpetuum_ Deo et S. Mariæ ecclesiæ S. Werburgæ et Rudulpho abbati et conventui dictæ ecclesiæ pro salute animæ Hugonis comitis, prædictæ ecclesiæ fundatoris ac pro salute animæ Randulphi comitis patris mei, et antecessorum meorum, et pro salute animæ meæ, et Christianorum omnium, omnem decimam integriter et plenariè omnium reddituum meorum civitatis Cestriæ,” etc.[273] This earl died in A.D. 1153. Earl Hugh Lupus, the refounder, who died in 1101, granted many manors, churches, and tithes, as _alms in perpetuity_. All the early parochial records are lost, and therefore in dealing with the old parishes we are at a great disadvantage. It is not so with the monasteries. The monastic bodies, free from Danish invasions, had carefully preserved all their charters of grants, because they had often to produce their title deeds when claims were made by others to some of the property which they possessed, and also when some of their property had been lost or taken from them by force or by kings. It was not so with regard to lands and tithes held by parochial incumbents. CHAPTER XVI. _THE DISSOLUTION OF MONASTERIES._ What precedents had Henry VIII. to guide him in dissolving the monasteries? (1) Edward I., in A.D. 1295, seized the property of the alien priories. (2) In 1324 (17 Edward II.) the lands and tenements held in England by the Templars were, by Act of Parliament, seized and transferred to the Knights Hospitallers, when the services of the former were no longer required for purposes for which the property had been assigned to them. (3) Edward III., in 1337, seized the alien priories, and let out the lands and tenements, until there was peace with France in 1361. The most valuable of them were naturalized, and thus became free from the yoke of any foreign monastery, and could elect their own priors. (4) Richard II. bestowed on the Carthusians several of the smaller alien priories which Edward III. had seized.