Definition
Nonz et decimz (also rendered as nonae et decimae) refers to two distinct payments historically made to the church by tenants of church-owned agricultural lands. The first — nonz — was a rent or duty assessed on things belonging to husbandry, typically a ninth part of produce or movables. The second — decimz — was a tithe claimed as a right of the church, independent of any tenancy arrangement. Together, the phrase denotes a compound ecclesiastical obligation combining a land-use duty with a spiritual levy.
Common Confusion
Nonz et decimz is frequently encountered alongside related terms that describe overlapping but distinct church payments. Nonagium (or nonage in its ecclesiastical sense, distinct from the legal-incapacity meaning of nonage) denotes a ninth part of movables paid to the clergy upon the death of a parishioner, ostensibly for pious distribution. Decimz alone refers to the tithe system generally. Researchers should not conflate these: nonz et decimz is a dual obligation tied to church-farm tenancy and husbandry, while nonagium is a mortuary payment triggered by death rather than land use.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs to a cluster of obsolete ecclesiastical property concepts that surface almost exclusively in pre-modern English ecclesiastical court records, manorial surveys, and legal treatises concerned with church lands. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law, agrarian history, or early English property law will encounter it in sources predating the dissolution of English ecclesiastical land structures and the standardization of tithe law by statute.
Several navigational cautions apply:
First, the Latin orthography is unstable across historical sources. The phrase appears in contracted, abbreviated, and Anglicized forms. Searches limited to a single spelling variant will miss occurrences.
Second, the compound term links two concepts that also appear independently throughout the corpus — decimz (tithes) has an extensive independent literature, while nonz in its husbandry-payment sense is rarer and easily overlooked. A researcher focused on tithe law may trace decimz extensively without recognizing that nonz represents a legally distinct, additive obligation.
Third, the ecclesiastical context means this term falls within the jurisdiction of canon law and church courts, not common law courts. Researchers expecting to find this concept addressed in common law reporters will be looking in the wrong place; the relevant sources are ecclesiastical court records, visitation documents, and canon law commentaries.
Fourth, because church-farm tenancy arrangements were progressively dismantled and regularized across the post-Reformation period in England, the term is predominantly a historical artifact. It has no modern operative legal meaning in any common law jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides a brief entry drawing on Wharton, distinguishing the two component payments clearly: nonz as a husbandry-linked rent or duty, and decimz as a church-right claim. The entry then pivots to the adjacent term nonagium, identifying it as a ninth-part mortuary payment — a structurally similar concept but arising from a different occasion (death rather than land use).
The Black's entry is minimal, serving primarily as a pointer for researchers encountering the phrase in older sources rather than as a comprehensive treatment. Wharton's law dictionary, cited as the underlying source, reflects the 19th-century effort to catalog surviving ecclesiastical law terminology; researchers needing fuller treatment should consult ecclesiastical law treatises of the same period.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any account of how these obligations were enforced, what disputes they generated, or how they interacted with the general tithe system as it evolved. For that, primary ecclesiastical court records and agrarian historians are better guides than the dictionary literature.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English ecclesiastical law history. It has no recognized equivalent or operative counterpart in American law, Scottish law, or post-Reformation civil law systems. Researchers in non-English jurisdictions encountering analogous church-payment terminology should not assume conceptual equivalence without independent verification.