nity or fine if a child, for instance,
left the manor; and similarly, if a villein died, his widow might have
to remarry or pay a fine. Thus the lord reacquired a servant and the
widow and her family were maintained. The courts, too, fixed prices,
and thus in local and limited conditions of supply and demand were
able to equalize them in a measure and neutralize some of the effects
of scarcity. In this way, till the reign of Edward I., and, where the
manor courts remained active, till much later, a self-supporting
social organization made any systematic public or charitable relief
unnecessary.

_The Parish and the Tithe._--The conversion of England in the 7th
century was effected by bishops, accompanied by itinerant priests, who
made use of conventual houses as the centres of their work. The
parochial system was not firmly established till the 10th century
(970). Then, by a law of Edgar, a man who had a church on his own land
was allowed to pay a third of his tithe to his own church, instead of
giving the whole of it to the minister or conventual church. Theodore,
archbishop of Canterbury (667), had introduced the Carolingian system
into England; and, accordingly, the parish priest was required to
provide for strangers and to keep a room in his house for them. Of the
tithe, a third and not a fourth was to go to the poor with any
surplus; and in order to have larger means of helping them, the
priests were urged to work themselves, according to the ancient canons
of the church (cf. Labbeus, IV. Conc. Carthag. A.D. 398). The
importance of the tithe to the poor is shown by acts of Richard II.
and Henry IV., by which it was enacted that, if parochial tithes were
appropriated to a monastery, a portion of them should be assigned to
the poor of the parish. At a very early date (1287) quasi-compulsory
charges in the nature of a rate were imposed on parishioners for
various church purposes (Pollock and Maitland, i. 604), though in the
14th and 15th centuries a compulsory church rate was seldom made.
Collections were made by paid collectors, especially for Hock-tide
(q.v.) money--gathered for church purposes (Brand's _Antiquities_,
p. 112). But there must have been many varieties in practice. In
Somersetshire the churchwardens' accounts (1349 to 1560) show that the
parish contributed nothing to the relief of the poor, and it seems
probable that the personal ch