Foreign News: Tithe War

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Since the Middle Ages sturdy husbandmen have grumbled at the tithes which thousands of them still have to pay to the Church of England. Last week 200,000 farmers, mostly in the southern counties, startled England by announcing, "We have banded together to protect ourselves from the effects of this 16th Century graft!"

When they ventured out on their parish rounds village clergymen in the remoter parts of Kent, Essex and Sussex were hooted. Bailiffs who came to force grudging farmers to pay up were stood off with sticks and guns. Some Kentish farmers even dug trenches, remindful of wartime, around the barns in which they kept stock which might be seized. A few boasted that they had strung up electrified barbed wire, shouted, "This is a tithe war!" Infinitely distressed and completely silent was Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. The legal experts of His Majesty's Government assert that ''the tithe is property''—which of course is sacred. Tithe rates (no longer the Biblical tenth of a farmer's produce) run less than $2 per acre per year, but English farmers, faced by a 50% drop in agricultural prices since the Tithe Act of 1925, vow that "On a 1,000-acre farm the tithe costs as much as five workers are paid now!" In Kent alone last week 600 farmers were specifically menaced by actions to seize their livestock. Most Britons agree that the 1925 rates should have been scaled down before Parliament adjourned (TIME, Aug. 7), but the Lords & Commons went home without facing the issue. Last week for the first time an aristocrat popped up among England's tithe-embattled farmers. Horsy and determined Lady Evelyn Balfour is a niece of the late, great Lord Balfour who died a bachelor and left his title to her father, the present Earl Balfour. Last week pretty Lady Evelyn was among a crowd of more than 100 Essex and Sussex farmers who set upon a bailiff. After rescuing the bailiff, police charged Lady Evelyn and 36 farmers with "unlawful assembly." In Castle Hedingham Court, she protested that she had been trying to stop the riot. With the whole countryside smoldering indignation, the court adjourned the case until after harvest time, enjoined the farmers to go out and reap what they have sown—after which attempts will undoubtedly begin to collect a tithe of the harvest. In all about £3,000,000 ($14,580,000 at par) are collected annually in tithes, two-thirds by that hoary institution called Queen Anne's Bounty. Its Chairman George Middleton is a onetime Laborite M. P. and friend of Scot MacDonald. Whenever the Prime Minister grows excited about tithes, George Middleton is wont to declare firmly "Queen Anne's Bounty never prosecutes in cases of genuine hardship."