THE TITHE IN ENGLAND – A REGRESSIVE TAX

Today, I’d like to talk about the Tithe – 10% of all income, in theory – so that’s a flat rate tax, again, theoretically, paid to the Church. 

The principle of progressive, rather than flat-rate, taxes goes back at least as far as William the Conqueror – at its most basic – ‘we’ll tax the people who’ve got money, as that will work better than trying to tax the people who haven’t got any’.  So – the Domesday Book was prepared, in order to find out who to tax, and how much to tax them – it was based on landholding and the capacity of that land to bring in income.  Land which had a mill, for instance, would be taxed higher.  The ordinary folk, who had barely enough land for their own subsistence – weren’t to be taxed.  As they held their land in tenancy or villeinage, they were counted in the tax-liability of their landlord. 

The Tithe however was flat-rate.  Another important difference in modern taxation, is that you pay tax on your profit, rather than your turnover.  But the Tithe was taxed on what you harvested.  So, you harvest 10 sheaves of wheat.  The production rate at the time was such that 4 of those sheaves would be for next year’s seed.  You’ve got 6 left.  You pay 3 sheaves to the landlord.  You’ve got 3 left.  And now you have to pay a Tithe on the 10 you harvested, so 1 sheaf goes to the church.  Now you’ve got just 2 sheaves to feed your family.

Lets suppose you’ve got tenancy on a much larger piece of land and you’ve got 1000 sheaves.  Of which you still have to put aside 400 for next year’s seed, your rent might be a bit less (economy of scale) so lets suppose you pay 200 sheaves to the landlord, and you have to give 100 to the church.  So you’ve got 300 sheaves left – the taxation on the basis of production rather than what is actually available to you is still unfair, but you’ve got 300 sheaves of wheat left in your barn.   Your land is larger, so you had labourers, at least at harvest, and maybe a couple of other times of the year so you give them 10 sheaves each, and now you’ve got 250 sheaves to feed your family. 

The local priest would actually be out in the fields, counting your produce, so he can see what you got, and will have noted (since unlike you, he’s literate) how many sheaves of wheat he can collect from you.  So lets look at the artisan or merchant.

The merchant doesn’t have accountancy skills, in fact, accountancy, as we now understand it, didn’t even begin to exist until the renaissance, when it was invented, in Italy, by the Medici (their great wealth was largely based on their improved record-keeping).  As a merchant or artisan, you might have some basic skills of literacy and numeracy, but only the major merchants would employ a clerk, and nobody had the skills to work out profit as we would understand it today.  So you sold 100 pairs of shoes, and you bought various quantities of leather, glue etc.  But no priest is watching your production, and your poor record-keeping means the priest isn’t in a position to check.  At the end of the year, you find you’ve get 10 silver pennies in your strong box, so you give one to the priest.  This is actually what you’ve got left after buying your materials AND keeping your household – a very different situation to that of the farmer.  Artisans and merchants were therefore very much favoured by the Tithe, but its still a flat rate tax.  The merchant with 1000 silver pennies will give 100 (if he’s honest) but that means he’s got 900 left, while the shoemaker probably needed all his silver pennies, the merchant is still rich having paid his Tithe.

And then, there’s the issue of what the money was used for.  The Tithe seems to have started before my period of study, in the Saxon era, and it was originally intended to be divided three ways – between the maintenance of the Church building (the Nave- the Chancel was the responsibility of the priest), the maintenance of the priest (from which he can  maintain the Chancel – and he does also have his own strip of land producing food), and any need to provide for the poor.  It would make sense if the priest were also expected to give a 10^th of what he receives by this to the Church, but it seems not, so in due course, the Bishops made a claim on the Tithe and it was divided four ways – so to the maintenance of the Parish Church, the upkeep of the priest (who can still produce his own food), the Bishop, and the Poor. 

BUT the Rector, the person with the right to collect the Tithe, moved further and further away from the Parish as time went by.  It was fairly common, for local landowners to build a church, and having done so, they claimed the right, both to appoint the local priest (Advowson) and to collect the Tithe.  So now that money goes in your landlord’s pocket – and is never seen again.  He might use it to maintain the church building, or he might not.  He will probably use it to provide for the priest, but he will make sure that that is someone he would want to provide for anyway –usually a younger son or poor relative.  He is highly unlikely to use it to provide for the poor.  His wife might be kindly, and dish out soup to the poor when they are sick, and there might be provision for basic needs in time of poor harvest, or there might not but that wasn’t what the Tithe was really for – that was actually part of the feudal contract which was supposed to be a mutual obligation – you will give your loyalty and your labour or rent to the landlord, be summoned into his fighting force at need, and he will look after you in your need.  As with so many things in life, the maintenance of the feudal contract as a two-way obligation depended on him being a good landlord – and if he wasn’t – tough. As time went by, that mutuality of the feudal contact came to be more and more forgotten – so labourers’ hovels might be collapsing and un-maintained, and the sick or injured labourer, even the labourer injured in military service, would simply become ‘the poor’. 

THE DEAD HAND – MORTMAIN

In the twelfth century, the monarchs began to be annoyed about the amount of land which was owned by the church – because the church was a ‘dead hand’, it paid no taxes, and since there was no point when land was passed from one to another via inheritance, that opportunity for income to the Crown was also unavailable.  And, due to landowners giving waste land to the Church to ‘save their souls’, the Church owned about a third of the land in England.  So from 1279 onwards, there were laws passed which banned the practice of giving land to the church.  But, landowners still wanted to save their souls.  So, they gave their right to collect the Tithe to the church.  Surely, this is inarguable, and indeed, when argued against, the Church always won.  After all, the Tithe was supposed to go to the Church, wasn’t it?  But, it went to monasteries, with a requirement that someone pray for the giver’s soul, as land had been previously.  Not to the parish from which the Tithe had been collected.  So now the Church, which already owned, and collected the Tithe, from a third of the land, also had the right to the Tithe from about another third.  And it didn’t come back to the parish.  Often, a priest would have livings (provided from the Tithe) in a number of parishes but would never be seen there – his life was lived in a Monastery or Cathedral Close, many miles away.  Out of his income, he would pay a stipend to a Vicar (which actually means ‘in the place of’ – the nearest modern English word is ‘vicarious’) to look after the parish.  A Vicar might be a good, well-educated priest, but he has far less income, and he doesn’t have the money for the provision of the needs of the poor, or for the care of the Church building – which all sits in the far away Monastery to which the right to the Tithe was given.

In due course, those vicars also sought positions – in the Church, at court, as Clerks in the growing business world where their literacy was much sought after.  And so they paid a part of their stipend to a Curate.  These curates were often very poorly educated, didn’t understand the Latin they mumbled in the services, had little interest in the spiritual needs of their community, and were barely any better off than the community so they were as busy as everyone else out in their fields growing their food.  The only part of the Tithe that they could claim, was a 10^th of what the villager’s wife grew in her garden – the eggs and cabbages with which she fed the family, and took to market for a little cash – basically, all the cash the household had to buy cloth, a new cooking pan etc.   This part of the Tithe (the lesser tithe) had always been hard to collect, so most priests hadn’t bothered, but these Curates, who being priests, still thought of themselves as somehow ‘better’ than the common people, were now as poor as everyone else in the village – and they tried to claim the lesser Tithe.  With all these features, these Curates were generally pretty unpopular, and parishes felt ill-served by the Church, but the one time the Monastery did pay attention to the village was at harvest, when a Tithe-collector would be despatched to observe how much was being brought in.

So we’ve reached a point where the Tithe is still being avidly collected, but there is no priest being properly maintained in the parish, the church building isn’t being maintained, the poor aren’t being fed – but incredibly beautiful monastic buildings are being built many miles away, where the monks do actually eat quite well.  The poor start to leave their land, and congregate around the monastery gates.  They are now not only hungry, but also homeless, and the monasteries can claim they do give to the poor, because they give out leftover food at the monastery gate.  But they’ve pulled the poor away from their parishes where they were known, and might have been cared about, and cared for – if the portion of the Tithe for their care had stayed in the parish.

Now it’s always been reality that two or three poor people who are well-known in their community are seen as validly due support:  old John, who was injured in the wars, Widow Betty, trying to bring up three children without means of support, and young Harry the ‘Simpleton’ as a mediaeval village would have called him, who can do the odd job if clearly directed, but can’t take responsibility for farming a strip of land – they are known, part of the community, and cared about.  If the village had money to provide for them, they’d do it gladly.  But the money has gone, to a landowner or monastery.  Twenty homeless paupers, hanging about in a monastery town in the hope of getting handouts at the monastery gate – they weren’t part of the community, and were seen as a social nuisance.  I would pin the blame for that nuisance firmly on the misuse of the Tithe, but of course, nobody was going to do that – the people who had taken it were powerful and/or ‘holy’ – far easier to blame the poor.

We’ve been travelling through the mediaeval period, and we’re now up to about the 15^th century, and of course, by this time there would also be poor people who’d been evicted from their parishes by the Enclosures, but they are a different issue, here, it is appropriate to acknowledge them, because while some of them would have gone into the cities and got jobs, others would have added to that crowd at the monastery gates, hoping for food.

THE REFORMATION

When, under Henry VIII, the monasteries were closed, those poor people who had been grudgingly fed by the monasteries were now without any help.  And both they, and the now evicted ‘lay brothers’ were homeless and unfed.  The social problem of poverty was now becoming a problem of crime, with homeless bands of desperate people roaming the country.  

And so we come to Elizabeth.  There had been laws against Vagrancy for a long time, and they linked to the old Feudal rules that a villain wasn’t supposed to leave his land- he was subject to his own, particular manor lord, not quite a slave (villains had some surprisingly strong communal rights) but he was definitely part of the manor and had no right to leave it.  Now, however, vagrancy had become a real problem and Elizabeth tightened up the law which made it punishable.  On the other hand, she also provided for the poor, with a new system –the Poor Rate.  Sadly, she didn’t see the real problem, which would have led to a far better solution – to return the Tithe to the parishes.  

So now, on top of paying the landlord his rent, and the Tithe, the tenant farmers now had to pay the Poor Rate.   The Tithe, now went to major landowners, or to whoever had bought the rights previously held by the monasteries, usually people who were not just major landowners, but a newly emerging extension to the nobility, as the Gentry were developing.  After the Black Death there had been a lot of unused land, and a number of freemen, had bought land, and were now becoming wealthy.  More than that, the merchantry were also wanting to establish themselves on the land, and give themselves the status that holding land could provide.  So the money from the Tithe, meant to provide for the needs of the Parish, its church, its priest, and its poor – now went to the wealthiest men (usually men) in the country.  

Some of the tenant farmers might be wealthy, but the majority were farming enough land that, once they’d paid their labourers, and their rent, and their Tithe, they could live a reasonably comfortable life – but they didn’t have anything spare.  So, as usual, the cost of supporting the poor fell, not on the truly wealthy, but on those who were just a bit above being actively poor. And they resented it. 

From this point on, the story becomes largely a story of the Poor Law, but the Tithe continued, being modified in various laws starting in 1836 with the last remnants of it finally disposed of by the Finance Act 1977.  

AFTERWORD – Chancel Tax

When we hear today of churches claiming Chancel Tax from parishioners, I can only think that those people’s houses must have been on, what were once,  Glebe lands, which, theoretically at least, belonged to the Rector, the person or body entitled to collect the Tithe, and it was the Rector, not the parish, who had the responsibility for maintenance, specifically of the Chancel of the church.

FURTHER READING

If you’d like to follow up on this –books I’ve learnt from on this subject:

A History of the English Parish – The culture of religion from Augustine to Victoria

N.J.G. Pounds, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pbk edn 2004

England Arise – Juliet Barker, Abacus 2014.

And of course, some of this comes from my reading on the Poor Law, for which my best reference is always:

The History of the English Poor Law,  Sidney and Beatrice Webb.  

Volume 1 would be the most relevant here.  I got it from the British Library, but its been reprinted in facsimile.

There will be many other books I’ve read that have fed into my knowledge here, but I haven’t written this piece academically, with footnotes and references, so these will do for anyone who wants to follow up on the subject.