“Athelstan, king, with the council of Wulfhelm Archbishop, and of my other bishops, make known to the reeves, etc.” Here is the King with a council of bishops making a law for the payment of tithes to bishops themselves and to their clergy. And this is considered the first general law in England for setting forth the payment of predial and mixed tithes. The population then was about 700,000. In 960, King Edgar passed his tithe laws with and by the advice of his Witan, who included the Archbishop of Canterbury, and bishops. The population then was about 800,000. Let us now take a glance at the number of bishops in England and Wales up to the time of the Norman Conquest. Kent had Canterbury and Rochester. East Saxons: London. East Angles: Dunwich and Elmham. West Saxons: Dorchester (transferred to Winchester), Sherborne, Mercia (including eight counties), Lichfield, Leicester, Sidnacester (or Lindsey), Worcester, Hereford. South Saxons: Selsey. Northumberland: York, Lindisfarne, Hexham. Sixteen bishops in England and 4 in Wales in A.D. 705, when the population was only 160,000, _i.e._ a bishop for every 8,000. By absorption only 14 bishops in England, 4 in Wales, and 1 in the Isle of Man in 1066, or one bishop for every 66,000 of the population. Lord Selborne, Bishop Stubbs, and Mr. Haddan[172] say the manorial churches, to which Edgar’s laws granted one-third of the tithes, were the type of our own modern parish churches. This I grant. It is _the first Act_ of Parliament by which they received tithes. By _custom_ the _mother churches_ originally received tithes. But it was not by custom, but by an Act of Parliament passed at Andover in A.D. 960, that the type of our modern parishes received one-third of the tithes of the parochial limits. Up to A.D. 1180, the owners of lands from which tithes arose might give them, as they please, to bishops, chapters, monasteries, or _to the parish churches on their own estates_. Hence, churches erected by landowners after 960 received in _many_ cases, up to 1180, _all the tithes_ of the new parochial boundaries, and not one-third. But I disagree with them in limiting the origin of the type of our modern parishes to A.D. 960. I trace the GERM of our modern parishes back to the two earls’ churches, consecrated in A.D. 686.[173] Soames, Lappenberg, and Dean Hook refer the origin of our modern parishes to Archbishop Theodore (668 to 693). That Bede’s churches were in the north of England does not militate against my view. _It was but the germ_, which gradually expanded.[174] CHAPTER X. _THE LAWS OF ETHELRED II._ The following nine laws appear in Thorpe’s “Ancient Laws,” etc.[175]