wn: see Spellman's
Glossary, IN VERBO Mancus. [w] W. Malmes. lib. 2. cap 2.]

His eldest son, Athelstan, being dead, Ethelbald, his second, who had
assumed the government, formed, in concert with many of the nobles,
the project of excluding his father from a throne, which his weakness
and superstition seemed to have rendered him so ill-qualified to fill.
The people were divided between the two princes, and a bloody civil
war, joined to all the other calamities under which the English
laboured, appeared inevitable, when Ethelwolf had the facility to
yield to the greater part of his son's pretensions. He made with him
a partition of the kingdom, and taking to himself the eastern part,
which was always at that time esteemed the least considerable, as well
as the most exposed [x], he delivered over to Ethelbald the
sovereignty of the western. Immediately after, he summoned the states
of the whole kingdom, and with the same facility conferred a perpetual
and important donation on the church.
[FN [x] Asserius, p. 3. W. Malmes. lib. 2. cap. 2. Matth. West. p.
1, 8.]

The ecclesiastics, in those days of ignorance, made rapid advances in
the acquisition of power and grandeur; and inculcating the most absurd
and most interested doctrines, though they sometimes met, from the
contrary interests of the laity, with an opposition which it required
time and address to overcome, they found no obstacle in their reason
or understanding. Not content with the donations of land made them by
the Saxon princes and nobles, and with temporary oblations, from the
devotion of the people, they had cast a wishful eye on a vast revenue,
which they claimed as belonging to them by a sacred and indefeasible
title. However little versed in the Scriptures, they had been able to
discover that, under the Jewish law, a tenth of all the produce of
land was conferred on the priesthood; and forgetting, what they
themselves taught, that the moral part only of that law was obligatory
on Christians, they insisted that this donation conveyed a perpetual
property, inherent by divine right in those who officiated at the
altar. During some centuries, the whole scope of sermons and homilies
was directed to this purpose, and one would have imagined, from the
general tenor of these discourses, that all the practical parts of
Christianity were comprised in the exact and faithful payment of
tithes to the clergy [y]. Encouraged by their success in inculcating
th