The Middle Ages need, in the first instance, to be understood on their own terms, not ours.
The other day someone waylaid me on the interwebs rather like that anachronistic anarcho-syndicalist peasant played by Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“…because some watery tart threw a sword at you.”), suggesting that the Tithe (Diezmo, in Spanish), introduced to 
by King Edgar in the 10th century, was a uniquely British form of oppression, whereby the Church extracted its one tenth share of the crop just so that it could indulge in ‘bling’.
A satisfying double riposte ensued, for not only could I refer to the ancient near-eastern history of the Tithe, I could simultaneously torch some of this person’s ‘Jesus was Palestinian’ presumptions: the word derives from Hebrew and the procedure was a key part of Jewish religious teachings, recommended in the New Testament by the Big J himself as an important part of spiritual discipline, and there are other Old Testament biblical descriptions of how it is supposed to work, binding the Israelite community together, funding festivals and supporting the Levites.
by King Edgar in the 10th century, was a uniquely British form of oppression, whereby the Church extracted its one tenth share of the crop just so that it could indulge in ‘bling’. A satisfying double riposte ensued, for not only could I refer to the ancient near-eastern history of the Tithe, I could simultaneously torch some of this person’s ‘Jesus was Palestinian’ presumptions: the word derives from Hebrew and the procedure was a key part of Jewish religious teachings, recommended in the New Testament by the Big J himself as an important part of spiritual discipline, and there are other Old Testament biblical descriptions of how it is supposed to work, binding the Israelite community together, funding festivals and supporting the Levites.
Edgar became King at precisely the moment when the monarchy was seeking some spiritual and symbolic fairy dust in order to move on definitively from the era when the man on the throne had been little more than a barbarian war-band boss.
The Church did not use the quota it gathered in order to indulge themselves in luxuries, instead most of it went into Mission-support, including the care for the sick and the needy, and the already very needy rarely had to pay the full 10% of this tax, which was nowhere near as regressive as later medieval poll taxes.
So in a sense, a precursor to National Insurance, which means that in some ways the early medieval English enjoyed better social care than modern Americans!
(If there were abuses to speak of, they tended to occur over on the Continent, where the Bishops sometimes ‘leased’ the Tithe rights to secular lords.)
So in a sense, a precursor to National Insurance, which means that in some ways the early medieval English enjoyed better social care than modern Americans!
(If there were abuses to speak of, they tended to occur over on the Continent, where the Bishops sometimes ‘leased’ the Tithe rights to secular lords.)
This book will be going straight into our loo. One can either read it cover to cover, or dip in all over, rather like Rayuela.
In the A section, I learned that Abad (Abbot) is an Aramaic word for Father (Jesus referred to his viejo as 'Abba') and also that the Abbey of Fontevrault was at one stage run by an Abadesa.
Imagine, a woman in charge of all those repressed males.
Imagine, a woman in charge of all those repressed males.
Deuteronomy 14:22-29"You shall surely tithe all the produce from what you sow, which comes out of the field every year"
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