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of £50 towards the renovation of Rochester Cathedral. His Library is, of
course, his main contribution to the physical restoration work, an entire
rebuilding of a church left ruinous for thirty years. These are mere gestures,
perhaps, in comparison with the rebuilding of an entire cathedral but the
same antiquarian intention is present in other legacies. The books are another
restoration wor k, some 3,000 of them being related directly to that great age
of scholarship preceding the Civil Wars. He also provided for the
continuation of weekly lectures by visiting clergy in All Saints Church at
Maldon, which as the Lecture, the Combination of Clergy and (originally)
the Prophesying, had for long been a special feature of the borough’s
religious life. He provided also £4 a year to ensure that the old custom of
public daily reading of morning and evening prayers would be maintained in
All Saints.
These were still only gestures by comparison with his contribution to a
restoration of the former scholarly characteristics of the Church of England’s
ministry'. His twenty- five years as an archdeacon were a practical influence
here, for he understood the poverty which prevented many clergy from
maintaining any scholarly standards in their work. Tithes were at the heart of
the problem.
Right
through the century clergy—especially
archdeacons—had proclaimed the Divine Right of parsons to receive their
parishioners’ tithe payments. Many parishes had, however, been granted to
monasteries in the Middle Ages, so that the tithes had become endowments
of abbeys and when the monasteries were dissolved between 1536 and 1540,
the payment of tithes, instead of reverting to the parish clergy, had become
the income of the layman who bought ex-monastic properties from the
Crown. This was the “Great Plunder” or “Banquet of the Church” in which
great landowners and the Crown fed themselves from the wealth that (some
said) belonged by right to the clergy. “Sacrilege”, said Hacket, referring to
this impropriation of wealth dedicated to God’s use, “was the sin of the
Reformed Churches and as the Papacy was much to blame to endure no
Reformation in the Church ... so many Protestants were more to blame who
reformed not out of conscience but covetousness” [3.2(b)]. At one extreme it
was argued that tithe-