40
version of 1652 is not in the Library. The MS title-page reads: “The Countriman’s
Catechisme or The Minister’s plea against the Countriman’s Appeale. Wherein is discovered
the Dutie and Dignities of ministers, their right to Tithes and the danger of altering so legall a
Custome which hath its warrant from the Word, from the practise of all Ages and confirmed
by the fundamentall Lawes of the Realme. These shalbe Delivered in 10 Sections to the
capactie of the Vulgar who may collect, if they puruse them with good attention, that in
petitioning against Tithes they both highly displease God and endanger their own Liberties . . .
Anno Christi 1648”.
50.
Christoper Elderfield, Chaplain of Sir William Goring of Burton, Sussex.
The Civil Right of
Tythes.
1650.
51.
Anonymous author.
A Brief Discourse of Changing Ministers’ Tithes into Stipends or into
Another Thing.
1654.
52.
Cornelius Burges, D.D., Parliamentary Preacher at Wells Cathedral, 1650s.
No Sacrilege nor
Sinne to Aliene or Purchase the Lands of Bishops.
1659.
He purchased estates formerly of the
Deanery of Wells and of the Bishop. His arguments on the nature of sacrilege and his eventual
fate — poverty and death by cancer of the neck — are discussed by Isaac Basire [55] below.
53.
Rice Vaughan, Barrister of Gray’s Inn.
First-fruits and Tenths out of Ecclesiastical Livings,
according to their present improved values, No Present For Caesar: or the arithmetick of Dr
Thomas Bradley, in his book called ‘A Present For Caesar Of 100,0001, in hand And 50,0001, a
Year' examined and found not to amount (by inversion) to 000,0001: 00s. 05d. A year.
1657.
This
is an adequate precis on the title-page of the short-work that follows. Dr Bradley’s book (which
must be of 1656-7 but is listed in the
Short-title Catalogue
as of 1658) is not in the Library, nor
his abject justification of it —
Appello Caesarem,
1661,
York — which followed the Restoration
of Monarchy and Church of England.
54.
William Prynne of Swanswick, Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn.
54.1
Ten Considerable Questions Concerning Tithes.
1659.
An example of the overexaggerated,
unbalanced writing which, in some 200 tracts that poured off his pen, kept Prynne in prison,
often in solitary confinement, savagely punished by Crown, Parliament and the New Model
Army in turn for some twenty years. In this tract he denounces petitioners for the abolition of
tithes as “anti-Christian, Jewish, burdensome, oppressive to the godly, conscientious people of
the nation, excited, encouraged thereunto by disguised Jesuits, Popish priests, friars and Romish
emissaries to starve, suppress, extirpate, our Protestant ministers, Church, religion, and bring
them all to speedy confusion”.
54.2
A Gospel Plea (interwoven with a rational and legal) for the Lawfulness and Continuance of
the Antient Setled Maintenance and Tenths of the Ministers of the Gospel. . . with a satisfactory
answer to all cavils anti material objections to the contrary.
1660.
55.
Isaac Basire, D.D., Archdeacon of Northumberland.
Deo et Ecclesiae Sacrum.
1668.
56.
Anonymous author.
The Evil Eye Plucked Out or, A Discourse on Church Revenues.
1670.
57.
Gilbert Burnet (see also 36.5 above).
History of the Rights of Princes in Disposing of
Ecclesiastical Benefices and Church Lands.
1682.
58.
Richard Simon.
The History of the Original and Progress of Ecclesiastical Revenues.
1685.
59-65.
Modern studies:
59.
Peter Clark (ed.).
Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England.
1981.
Leicester University Press
(
especially pp. 21, 97, 200).
60.
Patrick Collinson.
The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559-1625.
1982.
Oxford University Press.