It has escaped Lord Selborne’s notice that Cnute’s confirmation of Edgar’s law, which grants one-third of the tithes to the manorial priests, comes to the same thing as the threefold division of tithes in the Church Grith law. The principle is the same in both, namely, that the manorial priest, or the priest of the mother church, was legally entitled to no more than one-third part of the tithes, and that the modern use of taking _all the tithes_ was contrary to all rules, laws, and customs. They were never originally given, and would never be given to the priests on any such condition, namely, to convert them all to their own personal use—in fact, to be their own private property or income, as is the case now. Now the great and important question is, “When and in what way did the manorial priest acquire the other two parts?” How did the third, asks Lord Selborne, pass into the whole? His answer is, “There is not, as far as I know, so much even as a canon of any council, or a decree of any Pope in the nature of a legislative act, enlarging the right, or appropriating tithes generally, to parish churches in England or elsewhere.”[229] His conclusion is, that as the laity were at liberty to give their tithes to whatever church they wished, “they might with equal right and reason endow parish churches on their own estates with the predial tithes of their lands within the parishes; and the probability was that they would do so. No more likely explanation of the general prevalence of such parochial endowments, where churches were not appropriated to monasteries, has yet been suggested.”[230]