community the censure of the ordinary, the parishioners were happy to
do so. Owners of structures of any kind encroaching upon the
churchyard, or other church land, were promptly made to pay for the
privilege.[301] Occasionally parishes derived more or less large sums
from the sale of parish valuables. The sale of costly vestments,
embroideries, hangings, images, chalices, pyxes and other church
furnishings and ornaments condemned as superstitious by the Anglican
church, brought some income to the wardens of most parishes during the
first years of Elizabeth. Examples will be found in all the accounts.
Now and then, too, a parish would make a large sum from the sale of
the wood or other products of parish lands.[302] A fairly common item
in city parishes especially were fees paid for licences to eat flesh
during Lent and on other legal fast days.[303]

When an Elizabethan parish undertook some work on a great scale, such
as the rebuilding of its church, or of the church steeple; or, again,
when it had suffered great losses by fire or flood, it solicited
through _Begging Proctors_ the _Contributions of Outsiders_, sometimes
from all parts of England.[304]

To terminate our enumeration of means of raising money, or of
contributions of all sorts on which the wardens could count (as apart
from rates, properly so-called), we might mention _Fixed
Contributions_, of money or of labor, issuing out of certain
tenements; and _Annual Payments to Mother Churches_. Certain lands or
houses, generally abutting on the church grounds, had fixed upon them
the obligation to repair a certain portion of the churchyard
enclosure, Tenement X, so many feet of fence, Tenement Y, such a
portion of brick or stone wall, and so forth.[305]

Sometimes also certain houses or lands are spoken of as yielding so
much a year for the repair of the church and the support of the
poor.[306] Incidentally we might mention--though hardly connected with
parish finance--certain payments for church repair, etc., claimed of
old by some cathedral churches from the parishes of the diocese.
Originally a tax varying from a farthing to a penny for each household
(hence the names "smoke farthings," "hearth penny," "smoke silver"),
the payments were commuted for a small lump sum exacted yearly. Thus
we find in the Elizabethan accounts mention of "St. Swithin
farthings;"[307] of "Ely farthings;"[308] of "Lincoln farthings,"[309]
etc., according to the _name_ of the cathe