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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2011
In this chapter, we come to one of the main sources of monastic revenues; namely, those which were drawn from parish churches. In England, where the Reformation was comparatively conservative, there still subsists the medieval distinction between benefices; some are rectories, others are vicarages. In medieval Scotland, there was the same distinction, and the same reason for it. The normal parish was served by a rector, who took all the legal revenues of the parish. But about onethird of the English parishes had gradually come into the hands of monasteries or cathedrals or great collegiate churches; in that case, the monastery had all the rectorial rights, and left the parish duty to be done by a hired substitute, who was called by the ordinary Latin name for all kinds of substitutes, vicarius.
By early Christian law, the parish revenues were supposed to be divided into four portions; later on, this theory was changed to three; one for the parish priest himself, one for the upkeep of the church and services, and one for the poor and for hospitality. There is no recorded instance, so far as I know, of this division being strictly carried out; but such remained the theory throughout the Middle Ages. The main income of the parish (two-thirds of it at least) came from the teinds, or tithes; all men were bound to tithe not only their crops and their animals, but in many places their personal earnings also. We may form an idea of the minuteness of this income-tax, and its heavy incidence, from the following legal specification for a parish which had been appropriated to Newbattle.
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