Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 260

Between the late 1920s and the outbreak of the second world war a curious rural revolt shook parts of the English and Welsh countryside. The cause was the tithe, anciently, according to the Church of England, the first tenth of the produce of the land paid to maintain God’s work on earth. The ‘war’ of the 1920s and 1930s was not the first time tithes had caused problems. Secular ownership of many tithes after the reformation was a source of anger and grievance throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rioting marked the introduction of a new potato tithe on the Isle of Man in 1825, while many small farmers in the south and east of England used the tithe as a reason to support Captain Swing. Eric history review Evans’ admirable study The contentious tithe of 1976 took the story up to the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, which converted a physical ‘tenth’ into an annual money payment known as the tithe rent charge based on the previous seven years’ grain prices.

Commutation was, according to Evans, largely successful with ‘little cause for complaint’ either by farmers or the Church. Even the depression in wheat prices after 1879–80 seems to have left the system remarkably untouched with the rent charge remaining stable in relation to the original 1836 settlement until 1885. However problems remained. The tithe was abolished in Ireland after Irish disestablishment and a bitter campaign. In Wales, the young David Lloyd George cut his political teeth in the anti-tithe agitation of the mid-1880s and even in England the great royal commissions on agriculture of the 1880s and 1890s contain more than a hint that along with tenant right, the tithe was still a grievance for some farmers, especially as cereal prices remained low.

In 1891, a new act dealt with some of these problems but it was after the Great War that the problem of the tithe became acute. There were two reasons for this. Tithe was a charge on land and hence the responsibility of the landowner. The sale of something like a quarter of agricultural land to its tenants in the years 1918 to 1922 enormously increased the number of tithe payers. Moreover, these were often ‘small men’ heavily burdened with mortgage debts. Second, the collapse of cereal prices, first in the early 1920s and then again in the late 1920s and early 1930s pressed hard on the livings of these new farmers. On the other side, the income of the Church had been falling across the board since the 1900s. As a result the demands of a new and less wealthy clergy meant the Anglican communion and especially Queen Anne’s Bounty, the body responsible for collecting and administering the tithe, needed to maximize income.

It is this point the Carol Twitch’s book really begins. Although she presents a usually clear account of a complex and, to me at least, mysterious system of taxation, it is with the ‘war’ that her account comes to life. Drawing on the diaries and letters of A.G.Mobbs, a key figure in the East Anglian and then the national anti-tithe campaign, as well as his considerable archive, she gives a detailed and passionate account of the ‘tithe war’. Some of the material is well enough known to specialists, while some of the more spectacular events, like the auctions and distraint of goods in East Anglia and elsewhere have been the subject of two television programmes. However, as the first full length account of the movement, the book has huge value: I only wish I had had it to hand when writing my own recent book on the period. The story of Mobbs in particular, who was still fighting the tithe in the 1970s, restores to the historian of popular movements an unlikely hero. The careful use of his papers and other sources provides the academic as well as the interested general reader with a real sense of the anger of those involved as well as the intransigence of a Church which insisted that tithes were simply a species of private property and equated an attack on what was, after all, a tax on farming, with the end of civilization.

The centrality of A.G.Mobbs and the other key East Anglian figure, the novelist and farmer Doreen Wallace, does mean that the book is strongly centred on Norfolk and Suffolk. This does lead to a slight tendency to marginalize Kent, the other major centre of the English anti-tithe movement. What it does not do, though, is marginalize the first president of the National Tithepayers Association, the Rev. Roderick Kedward. If Mobbs represented the rather conservative face of East Anglia driven to revolt by the trials of agriculture, Kedward stood for another rural England, that of radical nonconformity. For Kedward and men and women like him, the tithe was an attack on the rights of the freeborn Englishman which nonconformists had defended since the seventeenth century.

There are complex and sometimes uncomfortable bits to the story, which this book is less firm on. Throughout Europe in the inter-war period there were close links between the extreme right and agrarian movements and this was the case with the anti-tithe campaign, which was courted by the British Union of Fascists. Although few of those involved among the tithe payers were fascists, it is clear that Mosely did find support among farmers and that figures like Viscount Lymington shared an active commitment to both far-right politics and theanti-tithe movement. The relationship between the farm worker and the anti-tithe movement is better dealt with although the difficulties many farm workers, especially of the older generation, found in supporting a farmers’ movement are not always understood. At its most simple, it was difficult to have sympathy for farmers (and the NFU), who, whilst they were complaining bitterly about tithes, were also cutting wages.

In 1936 the government abolished the tithe. The Church was compensated by a payment of some £70m, which was to be recouped by a tax on individual farmers farming titheable land and to be paid over a sixty-year period. In fact these payments ended in 1976 when the government decided that sufficient funds were available in the tithe account to enable full redemption of tithe annuities to take place.

Despite any criticisms, this is an excellent book. Its huge number of photographs and its detailed work especially on East Anglia provide historians with a starting point for a wider study. In the meantime it can be strongly recommended to all those interested in a widely remembered but little studied part of the history of rural England.