Four bishops who were members of the Second Synod of Tours (567) issued a letter to the laity in which they assert that the tithe should be paid. (Hefele, Vol. I., p. 394). The Second Synod of Macon (585) enjoined afresh the law of the tithe under penalty of excommunication for refusal to observe it. This is the first official enactment that is considered authentic by those who are said to be authorities. From that time on its endorsement and enforcement became common and at length almost universal in the Church. The first Christian emperors assigned land and other property to ministers for their support, but enacted no law respecting the tithe. The first legal enactment was made by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, 768-800, and Roman emperor, 800-814. His Capitularies established its practice in the Roman empire, and thence it spread to other lands. Offa, king of Mercia, introduced the tithe system into England about the close of the eighth century, and Ethelwulf in the ninth century, or according to Clarke (History of Tithes), Athelstan 927, made it a law for the whole English realm. To what the tithe was to be devoted was optional until Innocent III., through the Archbishop of Canterbury, 1200, issued a decretal requiring tithes to be paid to the clergy of the parish to which the payee belonged, which decree Clarke says was inoperative until reissued by the General Council of Lateran, 1215, when the parson was finally given the parochial right to the tithes. The tithe was introduced into Portugal and Denmark in the eleventh century, into Sweden in the thirteenth, and soon became a general law of Christendom.