Tithe Commutation Act 1836

A copy of some text from the ESRI Story Map of Whiteparish One Place Study 

The feudal system and the Domesday Book

The feudal system was a way of organising society into different groups based on their roles. It had the king at the top with all of the control, and the peasants at the bottom doing all of the work.

How did the feudal system start?

The results created what's known as the Domesday Book. It actually described a wide range of ways in which people used the land, but historians suggested that it had a basic structure:

• King – owned all the land.
• Barons – the king gave some land to the barons in return for money and men for the army.
• Knights – the barons gave some of their land to the knights if they promised to fight when needed.
• Peasants – the knights gave a few strips of land to the peasants and the peasants had to share their produce with them. They were not allowed to leave and were not free men

In the Middle Ages, anyone who was higher up in this system than you was a 'lord' and of course the monarch had no one above them. What kept the system working was loyalty. Stay loyal and keep the land and wealth. Fail and your income was taken from you by your lord.

Centuries later the system was not hugely different and Tithes came into play.

Tithes were originally a tax which required one tenth of all agricultural produce to be paid annually to support the local church and clergy. After the Reformation much land passed from the Church to lay owners who inherited entitlement to receive tithes, along with the land.

The Tithe Acts of 1836 and 1936 abolished the old system, but two hundred years ago tithes were engraved upon the lives of the entire population: a source of income, luxury and avarice for the privileged; a tax at 2s

Before Tithes

Fifteenths and tenths, 1334

FIFTEENTHS AND TENTHS: QUOTAS OF 1334

'Fifteenths and tenths, 1334', in A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 4, ed. Elizabeth Crittall (London, 1959), pp. 294-303. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol4/pp294-303 [accessed 24 June 2021].

By the last quarter of the 13th century Englishmen had become familiar with a system of tax assessment which took no account of such old-fashioned assessments of wealth as hides or knight's fees. This new system of assessment was based on a valuation of certain personal property, usually described by the vague word 'movables'. Of this value Parliament had granted the king a fraction: the fraction itself varied from grant to grant but in each grant a greater fraction was levied on cities, towns, and royal demesne than on other areas. Thus in 1332 the townsman found himself contributing a tenth of his assessed movables but the countryman only a fifteenth. In addition there were some categories of goods which the collectors were instructed to ignore, and as a result the statistics from the collections deal only with those Englishmen and women who were wealthy enough to fall under the scrutiny of the local assessors. It is rather like an iceberg the size of whose submerged depths is unknown. In addition there was probably evasion and under-assessment everywhere.

Frustfield Hundred 274s.

• Abbotstone (in Whiteparish);50s 0d
• Alderstone (in Whiteparish);13s 4d
• Cowesfield (in Whiteparish);100s 0d
• Landford; 66s 8d
• Whelpley (in Whiteparish); 44s 0d

Whiteparish does not appear as a separate settlement in 1334, assuming that the (in Whiteparish) is a later addition when the table was constructed from the original data. 

Tithe background

 From Wikipedia, extracts from articles about Tithes and Tithe Commutation

A tithe (/taɪð/; from Old English: teogoþa "tenth") is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government.

Church collection of religious offerings and taxes - England and Wales

The right to receive tithes was granted to the English churches by King Ethelwulf in 855. The Saladin tithe was a royal tax, but assessed using ecclesiastical boundaries, in 1188. The legal validity of the tithe system was affirmed under the Statute of Westminster of 1285. The Dissolution of the Monasteries led to the transfer of many rights to tithe to secular landowners and the Crown – and tithes could be extinguished until 1577 under an Act of the 37th year of Henry VIII's reign. Adam Smith criticized the system in The Wealth of Nations (1776), arguing that a fixed rent would encourage peasants to work far more efficiently.

The system gradually ended with the Tithe Commutation Act 1836, whose long-lasting Tithe Commission replaced them with a commutation payment, land award and/or rentcharges to those paying the commutation payment and took the opportunity to map out (apportion) residual chancel repair liability where the rectory had been appropriated during the medieval period by a religious house or college. Its records give a snapshot of land ownership in most parishes, the Tithe Files, are a socio-economic history resource. The rolled-up payment of several years' tithe would be divided between the tithe-owners as at the date of their extinction.

This commutation reduced problems to the ultimate payers by effectively folding tithes in with rents however, it could cause transitional money supply problems by raising the transaction demand for money. Later the decline of large landowners led tenants to become freeholders and again have to pay directly; this also led to renewed objections of principle by non-Anglicans.[39] It also kept intact a system of chancel repair liability affecting the minority of parishes where the rectory had been lay-appropriated. The precise land affected in such places hinged on the content of documents such as the content of deeds of merger and apportionment maps.

Tithe redemption

Rent charges in lieu of abolished English tithes paid by landowners were converted by a public outlay of money under the Tithe Act 1936 into annuities paid to the state through the Tithe Redemption Commission. Such payments were transferred in 1960 to the Board of Inland Revenue, and those remaining were terminated by the Finance Act 1977.

The Tithe Act 1951 established the compulsory redemption of English tithes by landowners where the annual amounts payable were less than £1, so abolishing the bureaucracy and costs of collecting small sums of money.

Ireland

From the English Reformation in the 16th century, most Irish people chose to remain Roman Catholic and had by now to pay tithes valued at about 10 per cent of an area's agricultural produce, to maintain and fund the established state church, the Anglican Church of Ireland, to which only a small minority of the population converted. Irish Presbyterians and other minorities like the Quakers and Jews were in the same situation.

The collection of tithes was resisted in the period 1831–36, known as the Tithe War. Thereafter, tithes were reduced and added to rents with the passing of the Tithe Commutation Act in 1836. With the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland by the Irish Church Act 1869, tithes were abolished.

Tithe War

The Tithe War (Irish: Cogadh na nDeachúna) was a campaign of mainly nonviolent civil disobedience, punctuated by sporadic violent episodes, in Ireland between 1830 and 1836 in reaction to the enforcement of tithes on the Roman Catholic majority for the upkeep of the established state church, the Church of Ireland. Tithes were payable in cash or kind and payment was compulsory, irrespective of an individual's religious adherence.

Tithe payment was an obligation on those working the land to pay ten per cent of the value of certain types of agricultural produce for the upkeep of the clergy and maintenance of the assets of the church. After the Reformation in Ireland of the 16th century, the assets of the church were allocated by King Henry VIII to the new established church. The majority in Ireland who remained loyal to the old religion were then obliged to make tithe payments which were directed away from their own church to the reformed one. This increased the financial burden on subsistence farmers, many of whom were at the same time making voluntary contributions to the construction or purchase of new premises to provide Roman Catholic places of worship. The new established church was supported by only a minority of the population, seventy-five percent of whom continued to adhere to Roman Catholicism.

Emancipation for Roman Catholics was promised by Pitt during the campaign in favour of the Act of Union of 1801 which was approved by the Irish Parliament, thus abolishing itself and creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. However, King George III refused to keep Pitt's promises. It was not until 1829 that the Duke of Wellington's government promoted and parliament enacted the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, in the teeth of defiant royal opposition from King George IV.

But the obligation to pay tithes to the Church of Ireland remained, causing much resentment. Roman Catholic clerical establishments in Ireland had refused government offers of tithe-sharing with the established church, fearing that British government regulation and control would come with acceptance of such money.

Scotland

In Scotland teinds were the tenths of certain produce of the land appropriated to the maintenance of the Church and clergy. At the Reformation most of the Church property was acquired by the Crown, nobles and landowners. In 1567 the Privy Council of Scotland provided that a third of the revenues of lands should be applied to paying the clergy of the reformed Church of Scotland. In 1925 the system was recast by statute and provision was made for the standardisation of stipends at a fixed value in money. The Court of Session acted as the Teind Court. Teinds were finally abolished by section 56 of the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000.

Tithe Commutation History

The extract below is from the The National Library of Wales. The same applied to England.

What Were Tithes?

Tithes were payments made from early times for the support of the parish church and its clergy. Originally these payments were made in kind (crops, wool, milk, young stock, etc.) and usually represented a tenth (tithe) of the yearly production of cultivation or stock rearing.

There were 3 types of tithe:

• Predial tithes were the products of crop husbandry - such as grain, woodland, and vegetables
• Mixed tithes were the products of animal husbandry - such as calves, lambs, wool and milk.
• Personal tithes were the profits of man's labour - such as fishing or milling (and largely insignificant after 1549).

It is more usual to refer to tithes as ‘Great Tithes’ and ‘Small Tithes’. The great tithes, also known as the ’rectorial tithes’, were payable to the rector and generally comprised the predial tithes of corn, grain, hay and wood while the small tithes, also known as the ‘vicarial tithes’, were payable to the vicar and comprised all other tithes

The ownership of the tithe was a property right that could be bought and sold, leased or mortgaged, or assigned to others. This resulted in many of the rectorial tithes passing into lay hands - particularly after the dissolution of the monasteries. These tithes then became the personal property of the new owners, or lay impropriators. After the sale of the tithes forfeited to the Crown in the 1530s, about 22.8% of the net value of tithes in Wales were held by lay impropriatorsat the time of commutation in 1836. A vicar usually continued to have the spiritual care of the parish and to receive the vicarial tithes.

From early times money payments had begun to be substituted for payments in kind. Fixed sums (moduses) were substituted for some categories of production, particularly for livestock and perishable produce; while adjustable payments known as compositions, which were sometimes assessed annually, were increasingly being substituted in local arrangements in latter years.

The National Archives holds a similar text as a guide, however, it was archived in 2015. Below is an extract from the archived version, just in case it disappears. The current version is In The National Archives Research Guides

The history of tithes

Originally, tithes were payments in kind (crops, wool, milk etc.) comprising an agreed proportion of the yearly profits from farming, and made by parishioners for the support of their parish church and its clergy. In theory, tithes were payable on

(i) all things arising from the ground and subject to annual increase - grain, wood, vegetables etc.;

(ii) all things nourished by the ground - the young of cattle, sheep etc., and animal produce such as milk, eggs and wool; and

(iii) the produce of man's labour, particularly the profits from mills and fishing.

Such tithes were termed respectively predial, mixed and personal tithes. Tithes were also divided into great and small tithes; generally speaking, corn, grain, hay and wood were considered great tithes, and all other predial tithes together with all mixed and personal tithes were classed as small tithes. It was common, but by no means universal, for the great tithes to be payable to the rector and the small tithes to the vicar of the parish.

During the dissolution of the monasteries, much church land - and in many cases also the accompanying rectorial tithes - passed into lay ownership. These tithes became the personal property of the new owners or lay impropriators. Usually a vicar continued to have spiritual oversight of the parish and to receive its vicarial tithes.

From early times money payments began to be substituted for payments in kind, a tendency further stimulated by enclosures, particularly the parliamentary enclosures of the late18th century. Enclosures were often made in order to improve the land and its yield, and had they proceeded without some arrangements respecting tithes, the rectors, vicars and lay owners of the tithes would have received an automatically increased income, as indeed they did when cultivation was improved without preliminary enclosure. One object of the Enclosure Acts was to get rid of the obligation to pay tithes. This could be done in one of two ways: by the allotment of land in lieu of tithes, or by the substitution either of a fixed money payment or of one which varied with the price of corn (hence the name corn rents applied to payments in lieu of tithes). The limits of the land allotted, or of the land charged with a money payment, were generally shown on a map attached to the Enclosure Award.

Tithe commutation from 1836

Statutory enclosure was a purely local affair, prompted by local landowners. Although much of the country was covered, in 1836 tithes were still payable in the majority of parishes in England and Wales. Scotland and Ireland have a different history: the Acts cited in this research guide did not apply there. In 1836, the government decided to commute tithes (i.e. to substitute money payments for payments in kind) throughout the country. The Bill received Royal Assent on 13 August 1836; three Tithe Commissioners were appointed, and the process of commutation began. Although the Tithe Act 1836 (6 & 7 Will IV, c.71) is a long and complicated piece of legislation, the underlying principle was the simple one of substituting for the payment of tithes in kind corn rents of the same sort as were already payable in many parishes under the authority of a local Enclosure Act. These new corn rents, known as tithe rentcharges, were not subject to local variation, but varied according to the price of corn calculated on a septennial average for the whole country. Existing corn rents were left unaffected: they continued to be paid according to the varied provisions of the local Acts which created them.

The first task of the Commissioners was to discover to what extent commutation had already taken place. Enquiries were directed to every parish or township listed in the census returns.

The initial process in the commutation of tithes in a parish was an agreement between the tithe-owners and landowners or, in default of agreement, an award by the Tithe Commissioners. Generally the next stage was the apportionment of payments, and the substance of the preceding agreement or award was then recited in the preamble of the instrument of apportionment.

Tithe maps

The Tithe Maps are by no means as uniform as the apportionments (see Section 6), varying greatly in scale, accuracy and size. At the outset, the Tithe Commissioners had attempted to secure a uniform and high standard. However in most cases there was no suitable map already in existence, and while there were many skilled land surveyors available, the expense of any new survey had to be met by the landowners. Insistence upon a fixed standard would have retarded the progress of commutation, so concessions therefore had to be made. When the 1836 Act was amended in the following year, a provision was inserted to the effect that, whilst every tithe map should be signed by the Commissioners, a map or plan should not be deemed evidence of the quantity of the land, or treated as accurate, unless it was sealed as well as signed by the Commissioners (Tithe Act 1837, s.1). Approximately 1,900 only of the tithe maps - about one-sixth of the whole - were sealed by the Tithe Commissioners, and it is these alone - called first-class maps - which can be accepted as accurate. The unsealed (or second-class) maps constitute a very mixed collection - indeed, some are little more than topographical sketches.

In many cases, discrepancies between apportionment and map subsequently created difficulties in the administration of payments and redemptions. At the time of the survey, when all the landowners concerned were well acquainted with the ground, the exact area of a piece of land or its precise delineation on a map might have appeared of little significance. The matter assumed more importance as time went on, particularly when readily-identifiable tithe areas vanished as a result of later developments. It is unnecessary to discuss in detail the problems of interpreting a tithe map; but it is well to bear in mind that reliance cannot be placed upon the area of individual tithe areas stated in an apportionment or computed from the tithe map, unless the map is sealed.

The numbers of the tithe areas on the map correspond to those in the schedules to the apportionment. These numbers are not consecutive.

Back to the The National Library of Wales.

The tithe maps

The accuracy of the maps depended on the skill of the local surveyors employed on the task. More than 200 different surveyors worked in Wales.

The first specification (British Parliamentary Papers, Session 1837, Vol. XLI 405) for the mapping proved to be over-ambitious. This was drawn up by one of the Assistant Commissioners, Lieutenant R K Dawson of the Ordnance Survey, and was intended to be at the scale of 3 chains to the inch (1:2,376) with a standardised set of symbols.

Unfortunately, this was not adopted, because the landowners had to pay the costs of the survey and many were unwilling, especially if they already had estate plans that could do the job.

Amending legislation had to be passed in 1837 permitting the presentation of less accurate maps, often on a smaller scale. Many of these maps were compiled from existing estate maps and involved very little new surveying.

Those maps that met the standard were calledfirst-class plans and received a seal from the Tithe Commissioners. The Tithe Commissioners refused their seal to inferior plans.

In Wales only 50 of 1,091 were sealed as first-class maps, mostly for Districts in Monmouthshire or Breconshire. The remainder were simply certified as being the documents on which the tithe rent-charge apportionment was based.

These second-class maps vary in scale and quality; there are some at the prescribed scale of 3 chains to the inch which for some reason were not sealed as first-class maps; while others are little more than topographical sketches and of no value for information about property boundaries, e.g. Llangeitho, Cardiganshire (1:7,920) and Nantglyn, Denbighshire (1:21,120). Some maps were simply enlargements of the Ordnance Survey One-inch maps.

How I make use of Tithe Apportionment and Maps

The first part of this is to record the process of how I create information out of the historic data, followed by what I subsequently do with that information.

The end goal is to create sharable information for Family Historians and for myself. My choice of Parishes is reflective of my own Family Tree at the location of key ancestors in the period that the Surveys and Agreements were undertaken, about the 1840's