#tithes

GENERAL — 74/262 — Tithes

A 'tithe' was a compulsory tax levied since ancient times. It was paid to the parish priest or other religious institution. The term comes from Old English and means an amount of one tenth of the value of the harvest. The inhabitants of monastery estates had the misfortune to be taxed twice by the Church — once in the form of a tithe, the second time as a mandatory levy for their occupation of the Church land.

TRIVIA

— According to canon law, tithes were supposed to be spent on the Church as an institution, on the maintenance of local parishes and on poor relief. Yet most of the profit only went into the pockets of high church officials like archbishops and bishops, while the local clergy and rural churches were often neglected, resulting in the levying of even more taxes. Furthermore, the tithe – which would quite literally mean the tenth of each cultivated product – was collected before harvest, and would thus also include any future costs, like the grains needed for sowing in the following season or for the payment in kind of harvest labourers. It is therefore not surprising that peasants quickly found their ways to lower the tithe to their best interest with the help of some tricks, many of which were recorded in legal countermeasures or complaints of the tithe owners. Most commonly, peasants would simply put a good amount of grains aside as they secretly harvested the fields on their own before the tithe collector came around. Or they would change the cropping patterns, and interplant tithable crops (like wheat, rye or oats) with non-tithable ones (such as broad beans, buckwheat or peas), or they would mix so many different kinds of tithable crops that counting the tenth for each kind and sorting them all on the collector's wagons would have been too tedious of a task. At other times, peasants would become really creative. Not every cropland would be tithed – orchards, meadows, woods and gardens were tax-exempt, and people made sure to use that to their advantage. Such as by sowing tithable grains into their garden, and then expanding the size of said 'garden' continuously over time. Where tithe enforcement was lax enough, this practice could even lead to whole communities of farmers suddenly changing their profession to gardeners.

CASHAPP

JCMOUTREACH

GIVE WHAT YOU CAN

If you don't tithe, the church won't have a functioning pantry.

If you don't tithe, the church won't have a rental assistance program.

If you don't tithe, they won't have a community help program; no church buses, no children's program, and no single parents programs.

If you don't volunteer, there won't be any Sunday school services or basic day care.

But this is all because people are too busy being blinded by the anti-prosperity ideas and just plain ignorance; or just being cantankerous and want to place blame and start drama. Weird.