Definition
Small tithes are a category of tithes — obligatory payments of a portion of one's produce or income historically owed to the church — comprising personal tithes (arising from labor and trade), mixed tithes (arising from the produce of animals), and certain specific crops including hops, flax, saffron, and potatoes. Wood was sometimes included by local custom. Small tithes are distinguished from great tithes, which covered the major grain crops (corn, hay, and wood in the primary sense). The term is synonymous with privy tithes.
In English ecclesiastical law, small tithes were typically payable to the vicar of a parish, while great tithes were payable to the rector. This division had significant consequences for church livings, parish finances, and the rights of lay impropriators who had acquired tithe entitlements following the dissolution of the monasteries.
Common Confusion
Small tithes and great tithes are easily conflated by researchers unfamiliar with the ecclesiastical classification system. The distinction is not simply one of quantity but of kind: great tithes covered the principal agricultural outputs (principally grain crops), while small tithes covered everything else — labor income, animal products, and minor crops. The line was not always sharp and was frequently contested in ecclesiastical and common law courts. Privy tithes is a direct synonym for small tithes; the two terms should not be treated as distinct categories.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering small tithes in historical legal sources are almost certainly working with English ecclesiastical law, primarily from the medieval period through the nineteenth century. The practical importance of this distinction collapsed progressively after the Tithe Commutation Act 1836, which converted most tithe obligations in England and Wales into fixed rent-charges, and tithes were ultimately extinguished in England by the Tithe Act 1936. American legal sources will rarely reference small tithes except in historical context or in the treatment of inherited colonial-era ecclesiastical arrangements, which were generally dismantled at or after independence.
The key research trap is assuming that "small" refers to amount rather than category. Parish disputes over whether a particular product fell within the small or great tithe classification generated substantial litigation in ecclesiastical courts and in chancery. Researchers tracing tithe disputes in pre-nineteenth century English records should expect to find the small/great distinction at the center of the controversy, particularly in cases involving mixed farming, novel crops (saffron and hops appear repeatedly in case law as contested items), and claims by vicars against lay impropriators who held great tithes.
The Rapalje & Lawrence source text shows a clear transcription error in the digitized version, with unrelated material from a different entry (relating to slave trading offenses) spliced into the small tithes definition. Researchers relying on that source should cross-check against the Black's entries, which are clean and consistent across both editions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions are in full agreement on the definition, varying only in a minor spelling difference (Black's 2nd prints "flax" correctly where the first edition renders it identically in substance). Both editions cite 2 Stephens' Commentaries 726, which provides the underlying doctrinal authority. The consistency across editions reflects the stability of the underlying English ecclesiastical law concept — by the time Black's was first published in 1891, the practical operation of tithe law had already been substantially reformed, but the classification remained legally and historically significant.
Rapalje & Lawrence, where legible, tracks the same definition and the same Stephens' Commentaries citation, confirming that the core description was settled across the major American legal reference works of the period. The corruption in the digitized Rapalje text is a database artifact, not a substantive divergence.
None of the three source dictionaries address the post-1836 reform context or note the American irrelevance of the term. Researchers should treat these entries as descriptions of English ecclesiastical doctrine rather than as guides to any living legal obligation.
Jurisdictional Note
Small tithes as a legal category are essentially confined to English and Welsh ecclesiastical law. Scotland had a parallel but distinct system of teinds. No American jurisdiction developed an equivalent structure; the First Amendment's Establishment Clause foreclosed any comparable church-state tithe system at the federal level, and colonial-era vestry assessments that functioned similarly were abandoned at independence or shortly after.