Definition
In English ecclesiastical law, great tithes are the more valuable class of tithes — the mandatory offerings or payments owed to the church from the most productive categories of agricultural output. Traditionally defined to include corn, hay, and wood, with some sources also specifying peas and beans, great tithes were distinguished from small tithes (also called petty tithes) by the relative value and volume of the crops involved.
Tithes generally were a one-tenth share of annual produce or income, payable to the established church. Great tithes represented the bulk of that value and were typically payable to the rector of a parish, whether a clerical incumbent or a lay impropriator who had acquired the rectorial interest. The right to collect great tithes was a property interest capable of ownership, transfer, and litigation, and remained so long after the religious rationale had faded from practical significance.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering this term in historical English legal materials need to understand that great tithes functioned as a form of real property right, not merely a religious obligation. Disputes over great tithes generated substantial ecclesiastical court litigation, equity proceedings, and common law actions through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Records touching on tithe apportionment, enclosure, and commutation are therefore found across multiple court systems and document types.
The critical research trap is assuming that great tithes were exclusively a church matter. Because the right to collect them could be held by lay impropriators — private landowners who had acquired former monastic or rectorial interests, often as a result of the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries — a significant volume of tithe litigation appears in common law and equity records having nothing to do with clerical parties.
The Tithe Commutation Act 1836 is the watershed event for corpus researchers. After that legislation, tithes in England and Wales were largely converted to tithe rentcharges, and the older vocabulary of great tithes versus small tithes gives way to a different administrative and legal framework. Sources before 1836 use the term with active legal force; sources after that date use it in historical or interpretive context. Materials from the tithe apportionment records generated under the 1836 Act often reference the great/small distinction as part of determining what obligations were being commuted.
Jurisdictional scope is narrow: this is a term of English ecclesiastical law. It will appear in Irish legal materials under analogous frameworks, but it has no meaningful presence in American law, which inherited no established church tithe system.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill and Bouvier converge on the core categories — corn, hay, and wood — with Burrill additionally specifying peas and beans. Both cite Stephens's Commentaries (3 Steph. Com. 127) as a shared authority, and Bouvier further references Burn's Ecclesiastical Law (3 Burn, Eccl. Law 680, 681). The agreement across sources on the substantive content is strong.
Neither dictionary develops the property-law dimensions of great tithes in any depth — specifically, neither addresses the lay impropriator question or the significance of the Tithe Commutation Act, which by the time of these dictionaries' composition had already restructured the practical operation of tithe law. Researchers relying solely on these entries for historical research will get an accurate but incomplete picture. Blackstone's Commentaries (cited by Burrill via Chitty's edition, 2 Chitt. Bl. Com. 24, note) remains a more thorough doctrinal source for the common law framework surrounding tithe categories.
Jurisdictional Note
Great tithes are a term of English and Welsh ecclesiastical law with parallel but distinct application in Ireland under the Church of Ireland framework. The concept has no operative legal meaning in American jurisdictions. Scottish law developed a separate system of teinds that, while analogous in origin, used different terminology and procedure.