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Updated: June 11, 2025
The power to read and write helped the clergy to much wealth. Privileges and charters from petty princes, gifts and devises from private persons, were documents which few, save ecclesiastics, could draw or dispute. Not content, moreover, with their territories and their tithings, the churchmen perpetually devised new burthens upon the peasantry.
In the first place, local organization as it existed at this time was the residuum of several successive systems of custom and law, and contained survivals from the nomenclature of each. "Township" or "town" was a term belonging to a far-distant Anglo-Saxon past, and had been long obscured by the later institution of tithings and the still later manors.
Ten of these tithings made an Hundred. Here in ordinary course they held a monthly court for the centenary, when all the suitors of the subordinate tithings attended. Here were determined causes concerning breaches of the peace, small debts, and such matters as rather required a speedy than a refined justice. There was in the Saxon Constitution a great simplicity.
His hundreds and tithings were as much suggested by the traditional arrangements of King Alfred as by those of Moses in the wilderness; and his next step was, in like manner, partly founded on Scripture, partly on English history, namely, the binding his Indians by a solemn covenant to serve the Lord, and ratifying it on a fast-day.
His commencement in carrying out this system was to preach Jethro's advice to Moses, and thence deduce that the Indians should divide themselves into hundreds and into tens, and elect rulers for each division, each tithing man being responsible for the ten under him, each chief of a hundred for the ten tithings.
Functionaries become sovereigns, with hereditary, not delegated, right to own the people, to tax their roads and rivers, to take tithings of their blood and sweat, to harass them in all the relations of life. There is no longer a metropolis to protect them from official oppression. Power, the more sub-divided, becomes the more tyrannical.
With a keen imagination and natural aptitude for the strikingly dramatic, he was able to present formally his ritual, tabernacle, holy of holies, priesthood and tithings, constitution and councils, blood atonement, anointment, twelve apostles, miracles, his spiritual manifestations and revelations, all in reminiscence of the religious tenets of many lands.
These regulations helped to keep the people of England the most backward in Europe; for though the division into shires and hundreds and tithings was common to them with the neighboring nations, yet the frankpledge seems to be a peculiarity in the English Constitution; and for good reasons they have fallen into disuse, though still some traces of them are to be found in our laws.
These were the evils for which it was necessary that the vigilance and activity of Alfred should provide a remedy. That he might render the execution of justice strict and regular; he divided all England into counties; these counties he subdivided into hundreds; and, the hundreds into tithings.
In a devotional service, they united in thanksgiving to God, that the lines had fallen to them in a pleasant place, and that they were about to have a goodly heritage. The wards and tithings were then named; each ward consisting of four tithings, and each tithing of ten houses; and a house lot was given to each freeholder.
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