Definition
A term from Scots law designating fixed annual payments drawn from tithes (tiends) and rendered to the Scottish Crown. Specifically, these were set rates extracted from grain tithes that had not been allocated to bishops or reserved for other ecclesiastical purposes: ten shillings from each boll of tiend wheat, eight shillings from each boll of beer (barley), and lesser amounts from bolls of rye, oats, and peas. The payments operated as a Crown entitlement to a share of the surplus tiend revenue remaining after ecclesiastical and pious uses were satisfied.
The term combines two distinct legal concepts: "annuities" in the sense of recurring annual payments fixed by formula, and "tiends," the Scots law equivalent of tithes — the portion of agricultural produce historically owed for the support of the church.
Common Confusion
ANNUITIES OF TIENDS vs. ANNUITIES (general): The word "annuities" in modern legal and financial usage refers to contractual or statutory payment streams, often insurance products or structured settlements. Annuities of tiends have no relationship to that body of law. The term is a historical term of art from Scots ecclesiastical property law and should not be imported into any modern annuity analysis. A researcher encountering this term in a historical Scots document has found a tithe-related Crown revenue mechanism, not a financial instrument.
TIENDS vs. TITHES: Tiends and tithes are functionally equivalent — both denote the one-tenth portion of produce claimed for religious support — but tiends is the term of art in Scots law, with its own distinct statutory and judicial history. English ecclesiastical law sources using "tithes" are not directly interchangeable with Scots sources using "tiends," particularly after the post-Reformation reorganization of Scottish church revenues.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is exclusively a Scots law historical term and will surface only in sources dealing with Scottish ecclesiastical property, Crown revenues, or agricultural tenancy prior to the twentieth century. Researchers should keep three navigational points in mind.
First, jurisdictional containment: this term has no application in English law, American law, or any other common law jurisdiction. Finding it in a source signals that the document is operating within Scots law, likely pre-twentieth century. If the surrounding text does not otherwise signal a Scottish context, verify the document's provenance before proceeding.
Second, the Reformation reorganization of tiends: the background to annuities of tiends is the post-Reformation settlement in Scotland, under which church revenues were partially redirected. The Crown's entitlement to these annuities arose from that reorganization. Researchers examining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scots sources on church property or Crown finance will encounter this term as part of that larger settlement, and it cannot be understood in isolation from it.
Third, the boll as a unit of measure: the amounts stated (10s. per boll, 8s. per boll, etc.) are denominated in both pre-decimal Scottish currency and in bolls, a Scots unit of dry measure for grain. Neither unit maps cleanly onto modern equivalents. Comparative valuation analysis requires consulting sources on historical Scots weights, measures, and currency before drawing any quantitative conclusions.
No modern equivalent of this payment stream exists. Researchers encountering the term in estate, trust, or property documents are dealing with an extinguished Crown revenue that should be treated as historical background rather than a surviving legal obligation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) carry nearly identical entries, reproducing the same commodity-by-commodity rate schedule without additional context. The entries are accurate as far as they go but are minimal: they identify the payer (the Crown), the source (surplus tiends), and the rates, but say nothing about the statutory or historical framework that created these annuities, their duration, how they were collected, or when and how this revenue regime ended. Both editions treat the term as an exotic Scots curiosity requiring only basic identification rather than substantive analysis.
The entries' agreement across editions reflects the absence of any doctrinal evolution between them — this was already an archaic term by the time Black's was first published, and neither edition adds interpretive depth. Researchers needing substantive analysis of tiend law and Crown revenues in Scotland must look beyond Black's to specialized works in Scots legal history and ecclesiastical law.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively Scots law. It has no counterpart in English, Irish, or American legal systems. Scots law on tiends developed along a distinct historical path from English tithe law, particularly following the Reformation, and the two bodies of law should not be conflated in research even where the underlying agricultural and ecclesiastical concepts appear similar.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The matching encyclopedia entries (on modern annuities, gross income from annuities, and private annuities in estate planning) are not relevant to this term. Annuities of tiends is a historical Scots ecclesiastical property concept with no substantive connection to modern annuity law, tax treatment of annuity income, or estate planning instruments. No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry is a natural match for this term.