Definition
In ecclesiastical law, altarage refers to the offerings made upon the altar, together with all profits accruing to a priest by virtue of the altar. The term encompasses voluntary gifts placed at or near the altar during religious services as well as the customary dues and small tithes that attached to the officiating priest's role. Historically, altarage formed a recognized category of clerical income distinct from the great tithes (such as those on grain and hay), which typically belonged to the rector rather than the vicar or curate.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The offerings made upon the altar or to a church; the profit accruing to the priest from the small tithes.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The offerings made upon the altar, or to a church; the profit which accrues to the priest, by reason of the altar, from the small tithes.
Editorial note: The common and legal definitions are unusually close for this term, reflecting its exclusively ecclesiastical character. The legal distinction worth preserving is that altarage, in a technical church-law context, was a defined category of priestly entitlement — a species of property right with recognized legal incidents — not merely a colloquial description of charitable donations. A researcher reading "altarage" in a legal instrument should understand it as a term of art carrying enforceable revenue rights, not simply a descriptive phrase for church giving.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Altarage as voluntary offerings: Gifts freely placed at the altar by congregants during services, generally treated as the personal income of the officiating minister.
Altarage as small tithes: The portion of tithe revenue — typically covering minor agricultural produce, livestock products, and personal labor — that fell to the vicar or curate rather than the rector or lay impropriator who held the great tithes. This distinction was legally significant in disputes over vicarial endowments.
Why It Matters in Research
Altarage is an archaic term unlikely to appear in modern legal instruments, but it surfaces with some regularity in historical sources touching ecclesiastical revenue, church property disputes, vicarial endowments, and the law of tithes in England. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century English ecclesiastical records, colonial American church records, or any corpus involving the legal status of clergy income should recognize the term and understand it as a revenue category with legal standing.
The primary research trap is conflating altarage with tithes generally. Altarage was specifically the smaller, altar-attached revenue stream. The great tithes — grain, hay, wood — were a separate legal category and typically held by a different party. When a historical document carves out altarage separately from tithes, it is making a precise legal distinction, not being redundant.
A secondary trap is treating altarage as a purely voluntary or informal matter. In English ecclesiastical law, altarage rights were often formally established as part of a vicar's or curate's portion and could be litigated in ecclesiastical courts or, after certain jurisdictional shifts, in common law courts. The term thus appears in records of both ecclesiastical and temporal tribunals.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is the most expansive, explicitly including contributions and tithes within the altarage concept, which slightly broadens the definition beyond what Black's and Bouvier's suggest. Researchers should note this variation when dating and attributing sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: offerings made on the altar and the profits accruing to the priest by means of the altar. All four trace the definition to the same authority — Ayliffe's Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani — either by name or abbreviation ("Par." or "Parerg."). This uniform citation indicates that the historical legal dictionaries drew from a single canonical source rather than independent legal usage, which limits the range of analytical perspectives available on the term.
Rapalje & Lawrence stands apart by explicitly noting that altarage includes "contributions, tithes, &c.," making the connection to the small-tithes dimension more direct than Black's or Bouvier's formulations. The Webster's 1913 entry, consistent with Shipley's usage, confirms that "small tithes" formed the practical core of altarage income in common understanding — a useful gloss for researchers trying to understand what the term meant in practice rather than just in legal abstraction.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the jurisdictional disputes between ecclesiastical and common law courts over altarage rights, the impact of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries on altarage as an institution, or the American reception (or non-reception) of the doctrine. Researchers needing that dimension will need to move beyond dictionary sources to treatises on English ecclesiastical law and legal history.
Jurisdictional Note
Altarage is primarily an English ecclesiastical law concept with roots in pre-Reformation canon law. Its legal significance in the United States is minimal and largely historical; American courts did not inherit the English tithe system, and altarage as an enforceable legal category has no recognized role in modern American law. Researchers working in common law jurisdictions outside England — including Canada, Australia, and former British colonial territories — should investigate whether local ecclesiastical arrangements adopted or modified the English tithe and altarage framework before assuming the English definition controls.