This right appears to have been fully admitted in England before the Norman Conquest, and acquired the name of tithe from a Saxon word signifying tenth. " Dismes or Tithes are an Ecclesiastical inheritance, collateral to the estate of the land, and of their proper nature due only to Ecclesiastical persons by the ecclesiastical law.- They were merely a right to the tenth part of the produce of the soil, produce of live stock, and the personal industry of Ihe inhabitants, in return for the benefit the latter derived from the ministry of their spiritual

I Manor Grant of Fordham. II, Bolton, 506, 2d ed., and ^os(. 211. D'Avner's Abridgment of Com. Law, 682.

pastors. They were an application of the Mosai law to modern exigencies, very similar to certain applications of other parts of that dispensation to thei own exigencies by the Puritan settlers of NewEngland, and were like the latter, strictly enforced. Both wer~ simply methods of paying the clergy. They were o various kinds and descriptions varying with the pro ducts of the soil, but these require no further men tion here.

Glebe lands, however, were very common in America, in New York, and in Westchester County. They were lands given as an endowment by the Lords of Manors, and other large landholders, for the support, or in aid of the support, of Rectors, or other clergymen, of parishes. The original parishes of Westchester County all had glebes ; and so, towards the close of the Colonial era, had the diff'erent churches and parishes erected and formed at different places, out of those parishes. Of course, all the original parishes as well as the later ones, were parishes and churches of the Church of England, as is shown by their very nomenclature. A nomenclature which the dissenting organizations of all kinds always repudiated, and never have used, since they severally came into existence during the last three centuries.