Art. 8. “If any one will not justly pay the tithe, then let the king’s
reeve go, and the mass-priest of the minster, or of the ‘landrica’ (the
proprietor of the land, lord of the soil) and the bishop’s reeve and take
forcibly the tenth part for the minster to which it is due, and assign
to him the ninth part; and let the eight parts be divided into two, and
let the landlord take possession of half, half the bishop; be it a king’s
man, be it a thane’s.”
Art. 9. “And let every tithe of young be paid by Pentecost, on pain of
the ‘wite’; and of earth’s fruit by the equinox or at all events by
Allhallow’s Mass.”
“On comparing these articles,” says Lord Selborne, “with King Edgar’s
laws, it will be seen that, if enacted, they would have omitted the
clause in those laws which authorized the payment of one-third of the
local tithes to a manorial church having a burial ground.”[176]
Dr. Lingard says, “But its (Edgar’s) subsequent re-enactment in the reign
of Ethelred, and again in the reign of Canute, will justify a suspicion,
that in many places its provisions were set at defiance, and in many but
very imperfectly enforced.”[177]
Bishop Stubbs’s references to articles 2 and 44, and to the latter part
of the sixth of this law prove (1) that he read the whole law of Church
Grith in Thorpe’s translation by referring to three articles of this law;
(2) that he referred to the third part in this law for the poor and needy
in thraldom in support of a certain statement which he made about the
poor; (3) that if he thought the law was not genuine or authentic, he
would not have quoted from it; (4) and that the very fact of his having
quoted from it, proves that he admitted its genuineness. Here are the
Bishop’s words: “The case of the really helpless poor was regarded both
as a _legal_ and as a religious duty from the very first ages of English
Christianity. St. Gregory, in his instructions to Augustine, had reminded
him of the duty of a bishop to set apart for the poor, a fourth part of
the incomes of his church. In 1342 Archbishop Stratford ordered that in
all cases of impropriation a portion of the tithe should be set apart for
the relief of the poor. The _legislation of the Witenagemóts of Ethelred
bore the same mark; a third portion of the tithe that belonged to the
church was to go to God’s poor, and to the needy ones in thraldom_.”[178]
Dr. Stubbs cannot go behind what he states above in his published history.
Let us now compare this statement with what he has written since
he became a bishop. “The tripartite division, never was adopted in
England, and that the passages in support of it are either altogether
unauthorized, or merely statements of an ideal state of law conformable
to the uses of some foreign churches.”[179]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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