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Updated: May 1, 2025
We find Archbishop Secker expressing his regret, not without cause, that chancels were not, as a rule, kept in much better order than other parts of the building. Incumbents were by no means so careful as they should be, and lay impropriators, whether private or collegiate, were generally strangely neglectful.
Their title to these dues is of considerably longer standing than that of his Grace the Duke of Bedford to Woburn Abbey, and those of so many lay impropriators of church property. If royal charters and Acts of Parliament are of no greater value than waste paper, there is of course nothing more to be said on the subject. There is nothing, then, to oppose as a barrier to any act of spoliation.
For five months the committee intrusted with the subject was silent; now, to prevent, as it was thought, the agitation of the question of advowsons, they presented a report respecting the method of ejecting scandalous, and settling godly, ministers; to which they appended their own opinion, that incumbents, rectors, and impropriators had a property in tithes.
A new class of ownership had been created the lay impropriators of tithes. The suppression of retainers converted land into a quasi property. The extension to land of the powers of bequest gave the possessors greater facilities for disposing thereof. It was relieved from the principal feudal burden, military service, but remained essentially feudal as far as tenure was concerned.
Religious scruples, however, seem to have caused the surrender of tithes by many lay impropriators, especially to monasteries. There were many other sources of wealth to the Church. An enormous quantity of property was bequeathed to pious uses by testators. The attendance of the clergy at the death-bed gave them an opportunity of which they were not slow to make use.
Every reader must recollect, that after the fall of the Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church Government had been established by law, the rank, and especially the wealth, of the Bishops, Abbots, Priors, and so forth, were no longer vested in ecclesiastics, but in lay impropriators of the church revenues, or, as the Scottish lawyers called them, titulars of the temporalities of the benefice, though having no claim to the spiritual character of their predecessors in office.
From advowsons, the next step was to tithes. At the commencement of the session, after a long debate, it was generally understood that tithes ought to be done away with, and in their place a compensation be made to the impropriators, and a decent maintenance be provided for the clergy.
But in 1688, alarmed at the prevalent impression that King James intended to insist on the restitution of the church estates to their original purposes, to wit, the education of the people and the maintenance of the poor, the Lord of Marney Abbey became a warm adherent of "civil and religious liberty," the cause for which Hampden had died in the field, and Russell on the scaffold, and joined the other whig lords, and great lay impropriators, in calling over the Prince of Orange and a Dutch army, to vindicate those popular principles which, somehow or other, the people would never support.
And that some tithes in the hands of impropriators, are under settlements and mortgages. X. That the gentlemen of this House should consider, that loading the Clergy is loading their own younger brothers and children; with this additional grievance, that it is taking from the younger and poorer, to give to the elder and richer. And,
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