The old difficulty, how to make people pay their tithes--not yet overcome by all the legislation on the subject in the years 1647 and 1648--presented itself to this Parliament. Cromwell's Council books afford numerous instances of ministerial complaints respecting arrears of income. Orders promptly made are recorded; but subsequent complaints indicate how the execution of these orders must have been resisted. For example, it was directed, in 1654, that an augmentation of the chapelry of Brentford, Middlesex, by a charge on the tithes of the Rectory of Ashwell, in Hertfordshire, up to that time paid in corn, should be paid in money; and the Lord Protector recommended that the income should be increased to £100 per annum. The same augmentation became afterwards charged on other Rectories; and, in the year 1657, his Highness and the Rector of Hanwell (Brentford being in Hanwell parish), appointed Abriel Borfett to the Brentford chapelry. Yet, after all these repeated arrangements, petitions for payment of arrears abundantly prove the difficulty which existed in the way of enforcing the claim.[146] [Sidenote: 1657, June.] On the 1st of June, 1657, Sir William Strickland, member for Yorkshire, moved the first reading of a new tithe Bill; and, upon Whitelocke's objecting to a clause in it authorizing ministers or their agents to enter men's houses to enforce payment, as a thing never granted even in times of Popery--no man having ever heard of a distress for tithes--the mover replied that he was afraid some persons had a design, by bringing disgrace on the system, to dishonour the Gospel; that there were men who would leap over hedge and ditch, and over the whole decalogue, and then scruple about tithes, and never willingly pay them; that some severity was needful to preserve Church revenues; and that the same principle which endangered one kind of property imperilled all the rest.[147] [Sidenote: _Catechising._]