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By Root 993 0

the second was a mortuary gift to the priest, and the third a charge on all free men, paid at Martinmas, always in kind, usually in grain. These were all relatively small charges. The chief support of the church was the tithe or tenth, familiar in the Old Testament, but only becoming obligatory in the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. Gerald of Wales told a story about a peasant who owed ten stone of wool to a creditor in Pembroke at the time of shearing, and when he found that he had only that amount, sent a tithe of it, one stone, to his church, over the protest of his wife, and the remaining nine to his creditor, asking for extra time to make good the deficiency. But when the creditor weighed the wool, it weighed the full ten stone. By this example, Gerald said, “the wool having been miraculously multiplied like the oil of Elisha, many persons…are either converted to paying those tithes or encouraged in their readiness to pay.”14

Tithes were spelled out in detail in a number of the Ramsey Abbey extents: in Holywell, the rector received from the abbot’s demesne tithes of sheaves from six acres of a field called Bladdicas, including two acres of wheat, one of rye, one of barley, and two of oats; and tithes of sheaves from the peasants in Southfield and “in the field west of the barns at Needingworth”; and “in the name of tithes” from the peasants, a penny per year for each chicken, an obol for a calf or a sheep, a quarter-penny for a kid, “and if they have seven sheep or kids, the rector will have one of them and [make up the difference] in silver, according to the value of a tenth part.” He received a tenth of the milk every day in the year.15 At Warboys the rector was also entitled to a tenth of the wool, linen, pigs, geese, and garden products.16

Tithes were collected as a kind of income tax from the rector’s living. From his spiritual jurisdiction over the villagers he collected voluntary offerings, or oblations, at Mass, on the anniversaries of a parishioner’s death, at weddings and funerals, and from penitents after confession. Offerings might be in kind: the bread for communion, wax and candles, eggs at Easter, cheese at Whitsuntide, fowls at Christmas. At Broughton, at the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Mary, all the parishioners, free as well as villein, gave as many loaves of bread as they had plow animals, one-third of which went to the church, two-thirds to the paupers of the parish.17

Finally, the rector had the income of his “glebe,” the land pertaining to the church which he held as a free man, owing no labor services or servile dues, and which he cultivated as a husbandman. Traditionally, the glebe was twice the normal holding of a villein, though in practice it varied. In 1279 the rector of the Elton church held a virgate, probably distributed in the fields, and, adjacent to the church, ten more acres and a farmstead.18 Surveys of other Ramsey Abbey villages list the rector’s lands in more detail. At Warboys, he held two virgates of land, a house and a yard, and common pasture “in the wood, the marsh, and other places.”19 The rector of Holywell held a virgate, “half a meadow which is called Priestsholm,” three acres of meadow distributed in “many pieces,” a tenth of the villagers’ meadow, and shares of a pasture and a marsh.20 In Abbot’s Ripton, the rector had a virgate, a parsonage, three houses with tenants, and “common pasture in Westwood.”21

The rector of Elton also rented a piece of land called le Brach. The manorial court took unfavorable notice of certain of his activities, the jurors complaining that he “made pits on the common at Broadmoor,”22 and again that he “dug and made a pit and took away the clay at Gooseholm to the general nuisance.”23 He may have been digging marl for fertilizer or clay to mend his walls. Medieval moralists were occasionally concerned lest the priest’s role as husbandman crowd out his spiritual life, and that “all his study [become] granges, sheep, cattle, and rents, and to gather together gold and silver.”24 Perhaps for this reason the glebe was sometimes