The grounds upon which impropriation made by lawful authority was justified in the Middle Ages were, apparently, that originally tithe had been paid to the bishop of the diocese for the general good of the entire district. By his administration of these diocesan funds he was enabled to assist good works of every kind at his discretion. When in process of time the parish became a sub-unit of administration, the local tithe passed into the administration of the local parson; but never without the dormant notion, not only of episcopal control, but fundamentally of ultimate episcopal authority over it. Up to the Reformation it was taught that tithe really ought to be divided into four parts: one part to go to the bishop, if he needed it; one to the ministers; one to the poor; and the fourth part for the repair of the church fabric. The notion that it was the great landowners who in the first instance endowed the parish churches with tithes, and subsequently took them, or a portion of them, away and gave them to religious houses and colleges, is for the most part quite imaginary. Tithe was, as already pointed out, the recognition of God’s supreme authority over the world, and a public acknowledgment that all things came from His hands, and the idea, which is a product of modern notions, that it was a charge made upon the land for the benefit of religion, is wholly alien to the spirit of pre-Reformation days. The very fact that this does not explain the existence of personal tithes, shows that the giving of tithes generally did not depend upon the generosity of any landowner or lord of the manor. Neither was the tithe ever regarded as the absolute property of the incumbent. Besides his recognised duty in regard to the repairs of the chancel, the poor were regarded as having legal claims upon what was received by him. What seems to us a somewhat strange custom was occasionally practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was the farming out of tithes by the rectors, or, in other words, raising money upon their expected receipts. For this the sanction of the bishop had previously to be obtained, and any pledging of the tithe for more than the current year was illegal. Beyond this, where a rector or prelate put his benefice out to farm, according to the law, he was bound to get four of his parishioners, approved by the bishop, to be surety for the faithful payment of the full portion (_pinguis portio_) of the tithe due to the poor of the parish. “I hold,” however, says the canonist Lyndwood, that this is not necessary “in the case of a rector or prelate, who, after farming out his tithes lawfully, continues to live in his benefice, unless he is suspected of not intending to succour those in poverty.” The duty of paying lawful tithes was constantly inculcated by synodal decrees, by bishops’ letters, and from the pulpit. Thus John Myrc, in his _Instructions for Parish Priests_, tells them--