Definition
An archaic legal term denoting tenths or tithes — specifically, the tenth portions of spiritual livings (ecclesiastical revenues) granted to the crown under English law. The term appears in medieval and early modern legal texts as both a general synonym for tithes and a technical reference to a particular royal fiscal exaction on the clergy. In ecclesiastical and revenue law, dismes referred to the share of church income claimed by the sovereign, a practice codified and administered through ecclesiastical courts and crown commissions.
The term is also historically significant in American numismatic and monetary law: "disme" (singular) was the original spelling used in early U.S. coinage legislation for what became the dime, representing one-tenth of a dollar — a direct linguistic inheritance from the same Latin root as the ecclesiastical tenth.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "disme" — no independent common definition beyond the archaic or numismatic context.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; related to "dime," defined as a silver coin of the United States equal to ten cents, one-tenth of a dollar.
The gap between common and legal meaning here runs in reverse of the usual direction: the legal term is older and more specialized, while the common word ("dime") is its diminished descendant. A researcher encountering "dismes" in a legal text should not assume a monetary context — the ecclesiastical and revenue law meaning almost certainly governs in legal sources predating the nineteenth century.
Common Confusion
Dismes is frequently encountered alongside tithes, decimae, and tenths in historical sources, and the three are often used interchangeably. They are not perfectly synonymous. Tithes is the broadest category — the general obligation to surrender one-tenth of produce or income to the church. Decimae is the Latin form of the same concept. Tenths, in English crown law, had a more specific administrative meaning: the formal grant or levy of one-tenth of ecclesiastical revenues to the crown, distinct from the parish-level tithe obligation. Dismes occupies the same conceptual space as tenths in crown revenue contexts but carries the French law influence that reflects its route into English legal vocabulary. Researchers should trace which institution was the claimant — church or crown — to determine which term the source is actually invoking.
Why It Matters in Research
Structural pattern: historical evolution with cross-referencing to ecclesiastical and revenue law sources.
Researchers will encounter dismes almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century materials — medieval statutes, ecclesiastical court records, canon law texts, and crown revenue instruments. The term dropped out of active legal use as ecclesiastical taxation was reformed and standardized in England, and it never became operative vocabulary in American law (where "dime" survived only as a monetary denomination).
Several research traps apply:
First, the spelling is unstable across historical sources. Disme, dismes, dyme, and dymes all appear, reflecting the French-to-English orthographic drift of the period. Corpus searches limited to a single spelling will miss significant material.
Second, the cross-reference to American coinage law is historically interesting but legally irrelevant for most research purposes. The Coinage Act of 1792 used "disme" for the ten-cent coin, but this is linguistic coincidence, not legal continuity. Do not import ecclesiastical law doctrine into monetary law research on the basis of shared etymology.
Third, Burrill's cross-reference chain — to Cowell, Blount, Decima, and Tenths — is the most useful navigational thread for researchers working in English ecclesiastical revenue history. These sources will provide the fuller administrative and statutory context that Black's compressed entries omit.
Finally, dismes appears in records relating to the dissolution of the monasteries, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, and subsequent crown administration of former church revenues. Researchers in Tudor legal and fiscal history will find the term most densely concentrated in those materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the core definition — tenths, tithes, ecclesiastical revenues granted to the crown — and all treat dismes as a term of primarily historical rather than current legal significance.
Burrill provides the most useful entry for researchers, identifying the Latin root (decima), citing Cowell and Blount as primary authorities, and distinguishing the term's relationship to the broader category of tenths in crown revenue law. The cross-reference to Decima and Tenths in Burrill signals that these are discrete headwords with additional detail.
Black's (both editions) is more compressed and notable chiefly for flagging the connection to the American "dime" — a piece of linguistic history that neither Burrill nor the ecclesiastical sources bother to mention. The note that dismes is "the original form of dime" is accurate as a matter of word history but should not mislead researchers into treating the two as legally related concepts.
None of the historical dictionaries provides statutory or case authority. Researchers needing primary law will need to look beyond dictionary sources to the ecclesiastical records and revenue statutes of the Tudor and Stuart periods.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Tithes; Ecclesiastical Law; Crown Revenue