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 THE 
 
 TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL 
 
 A SPEECH 
 
 DELIVERED IN 
 
 THE DIOCESAN CONFERENCE OF THE DIOCESE OF 
 PETERBOROUGH, 
 
 On FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21st, 1887. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 YEN. R. PRIDEAUX LIGHTFOOT, M.A., 
 
 Archdeacon of Oakham, and Vicar of Wellingborough. 
 
 PUBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF 
 
 Cbe Hig^t Jlcb. C^e ^rcsibent anb % gltmbtrs of tbc Conferciut. 
 
 PRICE SIXPENCE. 
 
 WELLINGBOROUGH : 
 DENNES BROTHERS, Caxton Printing Office. 
 
 LONDON : 
 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & Co. 
 
 1888.
 
 THE 
 
 TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 
 
 My Lord, 
 
 The Tithe question is at the present moment, as your 
 Lordship has already observed in this Conference, a burning 
 one. The conflagration, moreover, is not confined to Wales, it 
 is spreading in England. It will, however, be obviously im- 
 possible for me to attempt to deal now with the whole question 
 of Tithe Rent-charge. I will only say this upon it, that if 
 Rent-charge payers resolve to re-open the whole subject, then 
 Rent-charge owners will have a good deal to urge from their 
 point of view. In confirmation of this I may quote the 
 authority of no less a person than Mr. Chamberlain, who spoke 
 in 1880 as follows: — 
 
 " One question raised was, whether it was desirable to recon- 
 sider the tithes settlement of 1836. As to this, he was not 
 prepared to offer any opinion at all. It was a very large 
 question, with two sides to it, and any alteration in the interest 
 of the tithe-payers would be strenuously resisted by the 
 important body of tithe-owners ; and it was not certain whether 
 a strong case might not be made out, if any alteration were to 
 take place, against the tithe-payers, which would be in the 
 favour of the former. He did not doubt that, if there had been 
 no Tithe Commutation Act, the tithes would have been much 
 larger than at present, in consequence of the great increase in 
 the production." ■'■ 
 
 * Quoted by Rev. C. A. Stevens, Tithe Rent-charge Papers, No. II., page 32.
 
 4 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 
 
 In the year 1835 Tithe meant the right to one-tenth of the 
 gross produce of the land and stock upon it. In the year 1887 
 the Rent-charge, which has taken the place of the Tithe, means 
 much less than one-tenth. Certainly a sum of not less than two 
 millions annually has been lost to the Church by the working 
 of the 1836 Act, and "it is indeed held by some persons that a 
 sum nearly double that amount would not be an exaggeration. 
 
 The special subject, however, before this Conference is the 
 Government Bill* "to amend the law with respect to the 
 recovery and redemption of Tithe Rent-charge." I must deal 
 with the questions of recovery and redemption separately. I 
 ask then, in the first place. Why is an amendment of the law 
 deemed desirable ? To answer this question it is necessary to 
 refer, first of all, to the 1836 settlement. Previously to that 
 date two owners had shares in the produce of the soil : — the 
 Landowner, who had the right to a rent, the amount of which 
 was a matter of personal agreement between himself and the 
 tenant ; and the Tithe-owner, who had the right to one-tenth 
 of all produced out of and on the land. I must ask you care- 
 fully to observe that the amount of the Tithe had nothing to do 
 with the amount of the rent, and that the Tithe was always 
 discharged by the occupier. Upon this state of things came in 
 the 1836 settlement. By this settlement three things were 
 agreed to be done, and were done, and a fourth was 
 intended, and was not done. It was agreed (i) That the 
 produce of the tithe in the previous seven years should 
 determine absolutely the future share of the Tithe-owner in 
 the products of the soil. (2) That Tithe in kind should be 
 abolished. (3) That a " Rent-charge " should be substituted 
 for Tithe. These points were agreed upon. It is, however, 
 most important also to notice that it was unquestionably 
 intended by this settlement to arrange that the rights of the 
 Tithe-owner, now merged in a fixed rent-charge, should in 
 future be satisfied by the owner of the land, where the owner 
 and the occupier were different persons. To show that this 
 was, as I assert, the intention of those who framed and brought 
 the Bill into Parliament, it is only necessary to quote the words 
 of two members of the Government. 
 
 " Lord John Russell, in introducing the Bill, said, ' I propose, 
 as Lord Althorp proposed, that the owner of the land, having 
 made an agreement with the tithe-owner, should stand to the 
 tenant, not only in the situation of the landlord, but also in 
 
 * As the Bill has been through several editions, it is well to say that the 
 copy in my hands was one of the edition of 22nd July, 1887, printed by order 
 of the House of Commons. 

 
 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 5 
 
 that of the tithe-owner. The income of the clergy would 
 ultimately flow from the land-owners, and not from each tenant 
 or farmer, and the clergy would be relieved from an alternative 
 that now too often exists, either of making personal enemies by 
 pressing his demand, or injuring himself by abandoning it.' 
 Mr. Cutlar Fergusson, a member of the Government, further 
 explained : ' The tenant will no longer be liable to be applied 
 to for the payment of this charge, and the clergyman wull have 
 the great advantage of the security afforded him by the liability 
 
 of the landlord There is this additional consideration, 
 
 that the landlord is likely to lose in the payment of tithe ; for 
 he is bound to pay the full amount of whatever demand the 
 clergyman becomes entitled to, although being not able perhaps 
 to collect that amount from the tenant. Onl}^ consider, then, 
 the difficult situation in which the landlord is placed, whilst 
 the tenant is relieved from the liability of one shilling of tithe. 
 With regard to the clergyman, in addition to his having the 
 security of the landlord, is it not an advantage to him to be 
 able to collect his tithe at once, instead of having to go among 
 loo, or looo, miserable people for the purpose ? ' '"■' 
 
 There can be no question then as to what was the intention 
 of those w^ho proposed the measure in Parliament. There can 
 be no question also that the intention was not fulfilled, and it 
 is easy to understand how it happened that it w^as not carried 
 out in practice. Neither landlords nor occupiers cared that it 
 should be, and the words of the Act were not obligatory. The 
 Act said that " the Occupier shall be entitled to deduct the 
 amount from the Rent," not "shall deduct." If the three words 
 "be entitled to" had not been inserted in the Act, a very great 
 part of the present difficulty could not have arisen. But Land- 
 lords w^ere glad to escape the unpopularity of raising rents to 
 meet the charge, especially as prices were at that particular 
 date declining. And Occupiers knew that the amount of the 
 new" Rent-charge did not reach one-tenth of the gross produce 
 of the land, — as the tithe did, — and moreover the value of the 
 Rent-charge in 1837 was below par. So of course it followed 
 naturally enough that the Tenants continued to pay (i) to the 
 Landlords the same rent as before, and (2) to the Rent-charge 
 Owners another sum, supposed to represent one-tenth of the net 
 produce of the land before 1836, but really much less. The 
 good intention of the framers of the Act in this way came to 
 nought, and the Rent-charge Owners and the Land-owners' 
 Tenants have ever since been placed in positions relatively to 
 one another that were never intended, or even contemplated as 
 possible. It is true that the Rent-charge has all along been 
 
 * Quoted by Rev. C. A. Stevens, Tithe Rent-charsje Papers, No. II., page 28.
 
 6 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 
 
 paid, but paid by the wrong person ; and so it has come about 
 that the Tenant now often regards the Rent-charge as his 
 forced contribution * to the Church of which perhaps he is not 
 a member, and not what it really is, a property, as rateable, as 
 lettable, and as saleable, as any other property. 
 
 Now it is essential to the possession of property that it should 
 be recoverable. How then is Rent-charge when in arrear to be 
 recovered ? The answer is — By Distraint ; and here it must 
 not be forgotten that there were no County Courts for the 
 recovery of small debts in 1836. Well, now, what is Distraint ? 
 It is the legal but forcible seizure of a man's live or dead stock, 
 or it may be even the furniture of his dwelling-house. Distraint 
 for Rent-charge, then, means a forcible entrance into a man's 
 house or farm and the abstraction and sale of his goods, an 
 abstraction and sale, moreover, made by the personal direction 
 of his Clergyman. I do not pause to enquire what future 
 spiritual relations can exist between the man who sells up and 
 the man who is sold up ; but in all seriousness, my Lord, I do 
 ask this Conference whether such a mode of recovery of your 
 right, from a man who, remember, was never intended to satisfy 
 it, — from a man, moreover, with whom you never made any 
 agreement that he should satisfy it, — is not enough to make 
 your property stink in the nostrils of every Canaanite in 
 England, and every Perizzite in Wales ? i Can you be 
 surprised if he regards your claim as anything but a property, 
 and certainly not a Rent -charge? He calls it a tax, an 
 impost. And here let me quote from a very able article I read 
 in The Times of Monday last (Oct. 17th, 1887), contributed by 
 the special correspondent of that paper in Wales. He states 
 that what the opponents of the Church say is this — " ' Why 
 should we contribute to the support of a Church which, as far 
 as we are individually concerned, is not our Church ? ' And 
 the fact remains that they make, for the purposes of convenience, 
 a money payment ; that the form in which the Church asks for 
 that which represents the profits of her absolute property is 
 not dissimilar to that in which Imperial taxes are demanded. 
 It is a form which renders it almost impossible for the tithe- 
 payer to realize the nature of the property which the Church, 
 by force of law and by force of history, has in the tithe. It is 
 only by appreciating the difficulty which a tenant farmer must 
 feel in reahzing the situation that one can recognize the 
 plausibility of the present situation. He says, ' Why should 
 I contribute ; why should not Churchmen support their own 
 Church ? ' It is hard to convince him that what he deems 
 
 * Agricultural Depression, &c,, by R. E. Prothero, Esq.. page 8. 
 t Genesis xxxiv. 30.
 
 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 7 
 
 to be his contribution is in fact the contribution made by a 
 Churchman in past times, to the loss of his successors. It is 
 hard for him to reahze that if the tithe be diverted by Act of 
 Parhament from its present objects, logical justice demands 
 that it should be returned to the successors of the men who 
 consecrated it to the use of the Church." 
 
 I am afraid that some considerable share of the blame for 
 the present state of things must rest on the shoulders of the 
 Landlords ; but I hesitate to express any views of my own on 
 this point, and so I will quote from one or two of those articles 
 in The Guardian, by R. E. Prothero, Esq., which attracted so 
 much interest some little while since. " Landlords cannot be 
 acquitted of a large share of the blame for the present 
 resistance to the payment of tithe. '"^^ " But when the tithe- 
 owner gave up his claim to share in the increased profits of the 
 land, what was his quid pro quo ? He took a fixed rent-charge 
 instead of a tenth of the produce, on the understanding that 
 he would be relieved from the odium and unpopularity which 
 his existing relations with the occupiers necessarily produced. 
 The contract has been performed on the one side, for the land- 
 owner has been enriched at the expense of the tithe-owner ; it 
 has not been performed on the other, for the tithe-owner is still 
 placed in the unpleasant relation towards the occupier, from 
 which the Legislature intended that he should be relieved. 
 How has this one-sided result been produced ? By an arrange- 
 ment between the landowner and the occupier, entered into for 
 their mutual advantage without the consent of the tithe-owner, 
 often against his will and always against his interest. "f 
 
 I proceed then now to ask, — What amendments do the 
 Government propose to make in the present mode of recovery 
 of Rent-charge ? Three excellent ones are proposed in the 
 Bill. First (section 2), " Distress on the land shall cease." 
 Second, Rent-charge is to be recoverable as a simple contract 
 debt through the County Court. Third, in default of payment 
 a manager and receiver of the land on which the Rent-charge 
 is laid are to be appointed by the Court. The procedure for 
 recovery will be this, — the Rent-charge owner will, in the first 
 instance, move the Court to confirm his claim ; the Court will 
 then investigate it, and, if it confirms it, will proceed to enforce 
 it for him. The Conference will see in a moment that the 
 moral effect of this mode of procedure will be totally different 
 to an enforcement of his rights by a Rent-charge owner on 
 his own ipse dixit. 
 
 * Agricultural Depression, &c., page 9. 
 t Agricultural Depression, &c., page 34.
 
 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 
 
 Moreover there are two valuable and necessary provisoes in 
 the Bill. Section 3, sub-section 2, provides that if the Land- 
 owner believes that the Rent-charge exceeds the profits of the 
 land, and can prove his case, he should get relief. It is also 
 provided, on the other hand, by the next sub-section, that if 
 the Rent-charge owner is dissatisfied with the amount the 
 Court awards him, he may take possession of the land for the 
 whole amount due. 
 
 I proceed now to deal for a few moments more with the 
 other subject treated of in the Bill, viz. : the Redemption of 
 Rent-charge. This is a very different matter from the one I 
 have been attempting to put before you, and I, for one, am 
 strongly of opinion it would be very much better dealt with 
 in a separate Bill. 
 
 The present rate of Redemption is 25 years' purchase of the 
 Apportionment value. This rate, having regard to present 
 prices and the falling market, is, I cannot but believe, too high. 
 The Bill proposes to reduce this rate to 20 years' purchase of 
 the Apportionment value. Is this too low ? The question 
 must be considered from two points of view, that of the Rent- 
 charge oimiev, and that of the Rent-charge payer ; and, as it 
 happens, I am myself both an owner and a payer of Rent- 
 charge, and therefore better able, to a certain extent, to see 
 both sides of the question than some may be. Looking at the 
 matter from the standpoint of a Rent-charge owner, the Govern- 
 ment proposal would be this. My £"100 of Rent-charge 
 (apportionment value) would be taken as worth 20 years' 
 purchase. I should therefore receive for it ;f 2000, and this 
 would, at 3 per cent., give me an annual income of £60 in lieu 
 of my apportionment value of ;^ioo. Now the question to 
 be answered is this : — Is £60 certain without any deductions a 
 fair equivalent for ;f looof apportionment value with deductions 
 for Rates, Land Tax, losses, and cost of collection ? I have 
 not the least hesitation, as a Rent-charge owner, in saying that 
 
 1 think the proposed arrangement is a fair one to-day, though 
 I could not have said this ten years ago. Now it must be well 
 remembered, in the first place, that the value of Rent-charge 
 must unquestionably fall much lower than it is at present. 
 Last week's''' averages, — and they are not the lowest,— represent 
 a value below 67 per cent., out of which the rates. Land Tax, 
 and cost of collection will have to be met, without taking into 
 consideration losses through delay and non-payment altogether. 
 In the second place, endless trouble will be saved the Clergy 
 in respect of the assessment to Rates and Land Tax, and in 
 
 * Those for the week ending Oct. 15th, 18S7.
 
 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 9 
 
 the collection of small sums, and such trouble represents time 
 and money also. Thirdly, and I look upon this as of very 
 great importance, the Clergy will be relieved of all business 
 transactions with their Parishioners respecting Rent-charge. 
 This is a relief worth, I think, paying something for. " Higher 
 interests are at stake than those of money. The continuance 
 of the present arrangement imperils the stability of the Church 
 as well as of the fundamental principles of property.'"'' Last, 
 but not least, the proposed Redemption secures, what is of very 
 great importance for the Clerg}^ a settled income. They will 
 know beforehand what they are going to receive, and also 
 when it will be paid. 
 
 On the other hand, looking at this proposal as a Rent-charge 
 payer, I have to ask — Is it worth my while, from a business 
 point of view, to redeem ? Well, to redeem £ioo of apportion- 
 ment value charged on my land I must sacrifice ;^2ooo of 
 capital, and pay some expenses in addition connected with the 
 Redemption ; and in passing let me say that I consider that 
 the expenses attending Redemption at the present time are 
 much higher than are necessary. Now this ;^2ooo of capital 
 paid to relieve my land of the charge represents at the lowest 
 estimate ;^6o of certain annual income. This amount I lose, 
 and my land will also have to bear the Land Tax and Rates 
 previously paid by the Rent-charge owner. Besides, I must 
 not forget that I may be unable to raise the rent of the land 
 sufficiently to cover the amount now paid by the Tenant to the 
 Rent-charge owner. To sum this up, on the one hand I shall 
 by Redemption rid myself of a charge of uncertain amount 
 and have my land clear, and on the other hand I shall, as the 
 price I pay for this, lose about £jo of income now certain. 
 All things considered, I am strongly inclined to think that I 
 should answer the question in the affirmative. I think it is 
 worth my while as a Rent-charge />fly'?^ to redeem. 
 
 But after all, my Lord, the great question behind all others 
 is this — Is Redemption possible at the present time ? In the 
 large majority of cases it is certainly not possible. Landlords 
 have not the means. The proposal of the Bill therefore is in 
 consequence, unless other means are devised, likely to remain 
 a dead letter. Redemption will be of little value unless it be 
 general, and it can only be general if it is taken up by the 
 State. What appears to be an admirable scheme for this 
 purpose has been worked out by Mr. Ryde. I can do no more 
 now than just allude to it. It has, if I understand it rightl}^ 
 
 Agricultural Depression, &c., pap;e 35.
 
 10 THE TITHE RENT-CHARGE BILL. 
 
 three great merits : it would cost the State nothing, it would 
 benefit the Church, and free the Land. 
 
 My Lord, I have only this to say in conclusion. As a 
 Churchman I desire to see all personal grievances removed, 
 even, if necessary, at the loss of some of the Church's income ; 
 and as an Englishman I desire that all fixed charges on land 
 should also be removed, so that its use and occupation may be, 
 as far as possible, free. 
 
 I beg to move the Resolution which stands in my name — r 
 " That this Conference gives its full approval to the provisions 
 contained in the Government Bill for the recovery and 
 redemption of Tithe Rent-charge." 
 
 This resolution was seconded by S. G. Stopford-Sackville, 
 Esq., and, after some discussion, was put to the Conference, 
 and carried unanimously. 
 
 DENNES BROS., PRINTERS, WELLINGBOROUGH.
 
 
 
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