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Updated: July 27, 2025
"Very true, indeed," answered Adams. "I wish, with all my heart, the tithing-man was here," cries Trulliber; "I would have thee punished as a vagabond for thy impudence. Fourteen shillings indeed! I won't give thee a farthing.
With constables, deacons, the parson, and that lab-o'-the-tongue the tithing-man each on the alert to keep every one from drinking but himself, the Puritan had little chance to be a toper an he would. The colonists were fiercely intolerant of intemperance among the Indians.
Give an account of the tithing-man in early New England. In what sense is the word "parish" commonly used in the United States? Is the parish the same as the church? Has it any limits of territory? In Massachusetts, clergymen were formerly paid out of the taxes of the township. How did this come about? In this practice was there a union or a separation of church and state?
I dared not twist clear around, to see Tulp sitting among the negroes and Indians, on one of the backless benches under the end gallery; it was scarcely possible even to steal glances up to the side galleries, where the boys of lower degree were at their mischief, and where fits of giggling and horse-play rose and spread from time to time until the tithing-man, old Conrad to wit, burst in and laid his hickory gad over their irreverent heads.
'It is to be hoped so, quoth Saxon devoutly. 'And what else can you tell us of the revolt, worthy sir? 'Very little, save that the peasants have flocked in in such numbers that many have had to be turned away for want of arms. Every tithing-man in Somersetshire is searching for axes and scythes. There is not a blacksmith but is at his forge from morn to night at work upon pike-heads.
The tithing-man, who carried a long rod and kept order in the house, and out-doors at noontime, sat in the gallery, and visited any boy who whispered or found curious passages in the Bible and showed them to another boy. It was an awful moment when the bushy-headed tithing-man approached a boy in sermon-time.
The principal officers were the "reeve" or head-man, the "beadle" or messenger, and the "tithing-man" or petty constable. These officers seem at first to have been elected by the people, but after a while, as great lordships grew up, usurping jurisdiction over the land, the lord's steward and bailiff came to supersede the reeve and beadle.
Old "Uncle" Conrad or Coonrod as we used to call him the high-shouldered old pedagogue who was at once teacher, tithing-man, herb-doctor, and fiddler for our section, grumbled a little at the start; but either he had not the heart to take the bread from our mouths, or his own lips were soon silenced by the persuasion of our patrons.
Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging in a couple of small boys, whom he has caught at play beneath God's blessed sunshine, in a back lane.
The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man chosen for its governance.
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