The pecuniary arrangement usually made was that the small tithes--"_i.e._ the tithes of every kind except of corn--and the customary offerings and fees, were assigned to the vicar; while the religious house took the 'great tithes,' _i.e._ the tithe of corn." Sometimes the vicar took the whole revenue of the parish of all kinds, and paid a fixed yearly sum of money to the appropriators. Sometimes the community took the revenue, and gave the vicar a fixed sum.[84] There was an appeal open to both sides if it turned out that the original agreement seemed, on experience of its working, to be inequitable; and there are many cases in which vicars did appeal, and obtained an augmentation of their incomes.
A canon of Otho, 1237, required that a man instituted into a vicarage should be a deacon at least, and proceed to take priest's orders in the course of his first year.
The details of a few special cases will illustrate these general statements, and will help to admit us into the inner life of the mediæval parishes from a new point of view, and so increase the knowledge we are seeking of the day-by-day religious life of the parish priests and their people.
Thurstan, son of Wini, in the time of King Edward the Confessor, gave the Manor of Harlow to the great monastery of St. Edmund, recently restored by Canute; with the manor the church appendant to it; the convent nominated to the rectory as any other patron would do, until Pope Boniface IX.--for the monastery claimed exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, and regarded no one but the Pope himself as its superior--gave the abbot licence to appropriate the church, and to provide for the cure of the parish either by one of the monks or by a secular priest as the abbot should think fit.
In 1398 the abbot, in obedience to the canons, was willing to have a vicarage appointed for the well-being of the parishioners; the vicar was to have the _mansum_ of the rectory for his residence, and the tithe of all sorts of things, except the tithe of corn. It is worth while to give the list of the tithes allotted to the vicar, as an example once for all of what was included under the comprehensive name of small tithes, viz. of wool, lambs, calves, pigs, and geese; pears, apples, and other fruits of trees and orchards; flax, hemp, fallen wood, wax, honey and cheese; besides the tithes of a mill and a pigeon-house, and a money payment of 4_s._ 8-1/4_d._ a year, which probably was an existing composition for payment in kind or some small endowment for lights or what not. Then come some further stipulations. Seeing that the substitution of a poor vicar for a wealthy rector might affect the customary charities, the abbot was to pay 10_s._ a year to the parishioners to be distributed to the poor,[85] in compensation for any damage to them by means of the appropriation. Also the vicar was to pay a marc (13_s._ 4_d._) to the Bishop of London in lieu of certain profits which the see would lose by the new arrangement.[86]