The duties of the bailiff were to supervise the work on the estates. The steward presided in the courts. Sometimes one man was both bailiff and steward. The auditors verified the accounts of the bailiffs and stewards and collectors. The collectors gathered the rents and tithes, and as the latter were often paid in kind, the work was onerous. That so much of the financial and secular work of the monasteries was in lay hands must have immensely simplified the work of dissolution. The extent and value of the property were well known, and as the tenants came into contact with lay administrators much more frequently than with the “religious” owners, the change when laymen supplanted the latter as possessors of the estates came with much less of a shock than would otherwise have been the case. The change, indeed, probably seemed slight to the tenants. They had known little and seen little of the “religious,” especially in places at a distance from the house, and the same bailiff usually continued in his office at the change of ownership. Rents were probably not much raised. When the allotments of _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ can be definitely identified with those of the post-dissolution valuations the rents are generally unchanged, and in any place where they appear to be larger in the latter, the increase is probably due as much to deliberate suppression of part in the earlier returns, as to increased strictness by the new owners. For a similar reason the transfer of the tithes to lay hands was easier than would seem to have been likely. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been a bold step to have transferred to laymen payments definitely apportioned for religious purposes. But to the ordinary people the tithe had long ceased to wear an ecclesiastical dress. The vicars who had lost it had been denouncing it roundly for many years. It was regularly received by lay officials--often the collectors of the ordinary secular rents,--for the collecting of it was inevitably a matter of difficulty and much haggling, and needed expert knowledge. The benefits resulting from it appeared _nil_ to the payers, for it was taken away from the parish to the monastery, which was often far distant. Moreover, the tithes were sometimes actually leased to laymen. Thus “the whirligig of time brought in its revenges.” The spiritual character of tithes was lost, and they were transferred to, and remained in, lay hands without difficulty. There was, however, no spiritual gain from the change. The lay owners of livings were found appointing clergy of even lower calibre than the monasteries had placed in their appropriated benefices; they often appointed their servants, men who by habit and training were utterly unfitted for the position, and not seldom on the understanding that much of the endowment should be surrendered.