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This iniquitous deprivation of equal civil rights, accompanied with the onerous burthen of tithes falling heaviest on the cultivators of the soil, produced the first great Irish exodus to the North American colonies. The tithe of agistment or pasturage, lately abolished, had made the tithe of tillage more unjust and unequal.
Instead of collecting what the law enables them to collect, I believe they seldom or ever collect more than two-thirds; and I entirely agree with you, that the abolition of agistment tithe in Ireland by a vote of the Irish House of Commons, and without any remuneration to the Church, was a most scandalous and Jacobinical measure.
My grandfather having announced his intention of demanding a commutation of nearly double the sum, or of being paid his tythes in kind first his tythes de jure, and next his tythes by custom; enumerating them all and each; corn, hay, hops and hemp; fruits, roots, seeds and weeds; wool, milk, chickens, ducklings, and goslings, or eggs; corn rakings and pond drawings; not forgetting agistment and subbois, or sylva caedua; with many many more of the sweets of our prolific mother earth, which I would enumerate if I did but recollect them, and for which men so often have been and still are impleaded in Court Christian these particulars, I say, being recapitulated and set forth in terrible array, by the rector, excited in the whole parish so much dread of the rapacious vulture, who was coming with such a swoop upon them, that high and low, young and old, rich and poor, all began to tremble.
To exasperate the poor Catholic still more, the rich graziers of the parish, or the squire in his parish, pay no tithe at all for their grass land. Agistment tithe is abolished in Ireland, and the burthen of supporting two Churches seems to devolve upon the poorer Catholics, struggling with plough and spade in small scraps of dearly-rented land.
This iniquitous deprivation of equal civil rights, accompanied with the onerous burthen of tithes falling heaviest on the cultivators of the soil, produced the first great Irish exodus to the North American colonies. The tithe of agistment or pasturage, lately abolished, had made the tithe of tillage more unjust and unequal.
The tithe of pasturage, or, as it was called, the tithe of agistment, was being strongly resisted at the time, and many of the clergy were forced to sue in court before they could obtain it.
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