Tithes
******

A tithe is one-tenth part of one's income. Tithing, or giving a tithe, goes back to ancient times, 
even before Moses. In the Bible, Mosaic law required that the Israelites give one-tenth of the produce 
of their land and livestock, the tithe, to support the Levitical priesthood (Leviticus 27:30-33). 
Today, many Christians donate a tithe, or ten percent of their income, to support their church, the 
pastor's needs, and missionary work. 

English law very early recognised the tithe, as in the reigns of Ęthelstan, Edgar, and Canute before 
the Norman Conquest. In English statute law proper, however, the first mention of tithes is to be 
found in the Statute of Westminister of 1285.

The tithe system is said to have been first recorded in England in 747, and Henry William Clarke, in 
his 1894 book "Tithes; England, Ecclesiastical law" records:

   The English monks passed through three reformations at the Council of Cloveshoe, A.D. 747...
   ...that the discipline of the Roman Church on the Continent was imported into the English 
   Church long before the Norman Conquest. ...in treating of tithes and other church 
   endowments, strive to show that the Church of England, before the Conquest, had not the same 
   doctrines as the Roman Church. The object of this line of erroneous argument is to show that 
   the endowments of the Church of England were given to her when her doctrines were different 
   from those of the Church of Rome...

The only other reference around this time I can find is 794. The story is thus told by Dean Prideaux 
in his book about Tithes, (The Original and Right of Tithes, &c., Norwich, 1710): 

   ...About the year 794, Offa made a law whereby he gave unto the Church the tithes 
   of all his kingdom, which the historians tell us was done to expiate for the 
   death of Ęthelbert, King of the East Angles...

It is known from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Ęthelbert, King of the East Angles, was killed on the 
orders of Offa of Mercia in 794.

King Ęthelwulf (795-858) was best remembered for his donation to the Church. Landbooks refer to this 
transaction as a decimatio agrorum, and some have connected it with the institution of tithe, but 
clearly it had quite a different character. The chronicler Asser, who places the gift in 855, says 
that the king freed a tenth part of his land from royal dues and dedicated it to God for the redemption 
of his soul. This must mean that he gave very considerable properties to the monastic houses of Wessex; 
but we are left in the dark whether the king was tithing only with his private booklands, which he had 
power to dispose of by will, or with all the crown lands in Wessex. The right to receive tithes was 
thereby officially granted to the English churches by King Ęthelwulf in 855.

By 874 Guthrum became king of East Anglia, who almost immediately afterwards made a peace at Yttingaford, 
in the township of Linslade in Buckinghamshire, on the terms that the old treaty between Alfred and 
Guthrum of 886 should be reconfirmed and that the Danes, in the dioceses of London and Dorchester, 
should abjure heathendom and pay tithes and other church dues to the bishops.

In 927, King Ęthelstan published the following Ordinance : 

   ...I, Ęthelstan the king, ...make known to the reeves at each burgh, and beseech you in 
   God's name, and by all His saints, and also by my friendship, that ye first of my own goods 
   render the tithes both of live stock and of the year's earthly fruits, so as they may most 
   rightly be either meted or told or weighed out; and let the bishops then do the like from 
   their own goods, and my ealdormen and my reeves the same...

From then and throughout the Middle Ages, every parishioner of a tithable parish was expected to contribute 
one tenth of his crop, animal produce and other trade products, to the rector of the parish. Normally 
the rector was the parish priest, he received the tithes directly and stored them in his tithe barn.

The Saladin tithe was a royal tax, but assessed using ecclesiastical boundaries, in 1188. Tithes were 
given legal force by the Statute of Westminster of 1285. An Act of 1391 obliged monastic rectors to 
devote part of their tithes to the poor of the parish. The Dissolution of the Monasteries led to the 
transfer of many tithe rights from the Church to secular landowners and the Crown.

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 in 1538, 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. 

The maps show houses, boundaries, acreages, land-use and field names. These maps and schedules can be 
very useful, especially pre the 1841 census, in determining whether ones ancestors occupied property, 
and whether as landlord or tenant.

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. In 1836, the government decided to commute tithes (i.e. to substitute money payments for 
payments in kind) throughout the country.

The Tithes Commutation Act of 1836 enabled commutation to be made more easily by commissioners in 
negotiation with the inhabitants of each parish on the basis of a land valuation. Tithe Awards are 
incorporated in schedules arranged alphabetically under parish landowners and show the occupiers, the 
acreage of each parcel of land, the annual amount of tithe payable, and a numerical reference to an 
accompanying large scale map.

Thus The old system ended with the Tithe Commutation Act 1836, and was replaced with a rent charge 
decided by a Tithe Commission.

Tithe Awards were drawn up in three copies, the one for the commissioners is now at The National 
Archives (TNA) , the one for the bishop is either at the diocesan registry or the county RO (but the 
Welsh ones are at the NLW), the one for the incumbent may still be in the parish chest or the county 
Records Offices.

The records of land ownership, or Tithe Files, made by the Commission are now a valuable resource.
There may be pre 1836 tithe records for some parishes in county ROs. 


Hearth Tax
********** 

The hearth tax was levied between 1662 and 1689 on each householder according to the number of hearths 
in his or her dwelling. The administrators were required to compile lists of householders with the 
number of their hearths according to county.

The Hearth Tax was a national tax granted by Parliament to support the government of the newly 
restored Stuart Monarchy. As was common for most direct taxes before the introduction of Income Tax 
over a century later, it was a wealth tax, in this instance using the size of house (determined by 
the number of hearths or fireplaces it contained) as a proxy for the wealth of the household. To 
implement it, there had to be a nationwide listing or 'return' of householders and hearths, by ward 
or parish, town, and county, regularly updated. 

Many of these listings survive in The National Archives, Kew, and they provide an important insight 
into distributions of wealth across the country, as well as allowing modern readers to search for 
named individuals.


Land Tax
********

The Land Tax was first regularly imposed annually in 1693.

land tax is an indirect tax levied on the value of land and often forms part of a wider property 
taxation. In Roman times the provinces relied upon land taxes for a considerable part of their revenue 
and their importance continued into medieval times. Local government relied upon land taxes (in the 
form of rates) for much of their revenue from the mid-17c until the 1980s. Throughout the whole 
of the 18c the land tax was the main source of government revenue. 

Introduced in 1693 to pay for the French wars of William III's reign, it sufficed until 1799 when the 
cost of the Revolutionary War forced Pitt to the even more drastic expedient of income tax. It was an 
object of Walpole's government in particular to avoid involvement in war so that the land tax could be 
kept down and the gentry kept contented.

There are practical difficulties however in assessing the value of land to be taxed and in ensuring 
that there are no disincentive impacts on its productive use. Land taxes are in rem and unlinked to 
the circumstances of owners, which can lead to undesirable distributional consequences.

A quota was fixed for each county and local assessors were left to allot appropriate sums to each 
parish, and within the parishes, to each taxpayer; and was largely confined to owners of real estate. 
Only a few early records survive. In 1772 the returns were altered to include all the occupiers of 
land in each parish, then changed to include the owner of each building.

From 1780 duplicates had to be lodged with the Clerk of the Peace, these records are available down 
to 1832 after which they became less regular. From 1798 landowners were able to "buy themselves out" 
from the tax, a lump sum of 15 years purchase was levied, however their names continued to be listed 
as such. The tax lapsed in 1816 but was levied again from 1842, finally ending in 1949.

The records from 1780 are in county Records Offices, usually in annual bundles with parishes grouped 
in Hundreds. Land Tax Assessments may help track family movements during the 1780-1832 time period.

Window Tax
**********

In 1696 in the reign of William III another form of taxation came into force this was known as the 
'Window Tax' and would last until 1851. his new tax replaced the Hearth Tax which had been ended a 
few years earlier. One of the chief objections to the Hearth Tax had been that it could involve the 
intrusion of inspectors into private dwellings, in contrast the Window Tax was assessed from outside.

It was introduced during the reign of William III as part of the beautifully named "Act of Making 
Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money". It was considered by the law-makers to be fair as the 
greater demand was placed on the better-off, living by default in larger houses and therefore with 
more windows and those of very meagre means were exempt.
 
When the Act was passed in 1696 it was a tax for the occupiers of the house, not the owner. Only if 
the property was empty would the owner be liable to pay. There were 2 parts to the levy. 

First, a flat-rate house tax of 2 shillings and the second payment was determined by the number of 
windows. Properties with between ten and twenty windows paid a total of 4 shillings, and those above 
twenty windows paid 8 shillings. 

The minimum number that could be taxed was reduced to 7 in 1766 and increased to 8 in 1825. 

The flat-rate tax was changed to a variable rate in 1778, when it became determined by the property's 
value, not simply its existence. Scotland was spared the tax for nearly 100 years.
 
Unfortunately none of these records appeared to have survived, one way for a person to by pass the 
tax was to brick up one or two windows over the stated six, even today on some of the older houses 
the bricked up windows are still there, and still called "Pitt's Pictures".

It was finally abolished in 1851.

The very few extant records are at the National Archives, they have the name and address of the tax 
payer, number of windows and amount of tax paid. 



Income Tax
**********

One of the first recorded taxes on income was the Saladin tithe introduced by Henry II in 1188 to 
raise money for the Third Crusade. The tithe demanded that each layperson in England be taxed a tenth 
of their personal income and movable property. However, the inception date of the modern income tax 
is typically accepted as 1799.

Income tax was announced in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 and 
introduced in 1799, to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. The cost 
of war had drained Britain's resources, and run up a considerable national debt. The army was starving, 
and poor conditions in the navy in 1797 had led to mutiny. Pitt's new graduated income tax began at a 
levy of 2d in the pound on annual incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound 
(10%) on incomes of over £200. Pitt hoped that the new income tax would raise £10 million, but actual 
receipts for 1799 totalled just over £6 million.

The tax was repealed in 1816 and opponents of the tax, who thought it should only be used to finance 
wars, wanted all records of the tax destroyed along with its repeal. The critics of income tax had won 
the day, but experience had proved that it was a practical means of raising revenue, that it could be 
applied fairly, and that concerns about invasion of privacy were largely misplaced. The critics were 
also frustrated in the destruction of the records, unaware that duplicates had already been sent to 
the King's Remembrancer.

The mid-1800s saw the beginnings of significant social and economic change. Child labour was limited, 
slavery in the Empire ended, and the potato famine began in Ireland began in the mid-1840s.

The general election of 1841 was won by the Conservatives with Sir Robert Peel as Prime Minister. 
Although he had opposed income tax, there was a surprise return of the tax in his 1842 Budget. 

Peel's income tax was imposed for three years, with the possibility of a two year extension. A funding 
crisis in the railways and increasing national expenditure ensured that it was maintained.

Income tax is still a 'temporary' tax - it expires each year on 5 April and Parliament has to reapply 
it by an annual Finance Act.

In addition to these taxes, during World War I an Excess Profits Duty was introduced to raise revenue 
and to remove the excessive profits that firms had made from the war effort. With this and other tax 
changes, the total collected rose to over £580 million - seventeen times the 1905 figure when income 
tax was still the legacy of Pitt, Addington, Peel and Gladstone. 


Sources:
www.hearthtax.org.uk/
Kenneth Button
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ukwales2/hicks3.html
www.british-history.ac.uk/
familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/England_Taxation
www.encyclopedia.com/
www.longparish.org.uk
www.projectbook.co.uk/
Humphrey Prideaux: "The Original and Right of Tithes, &c.", Norwich, 1710