The tithes of Silkstone in 1787 were in the hands of the Earl of Strafford, the Countess of Bute, Sir Thomas Blackett, and Walter Spencer-Stanhope.
We see here how tithes became alienated from the Church, and how certain lands became exempted from the payment of tithes and still continue to be. All estates and property belonging to a religious corporation were by the common law free from tithes, and this exemption was continued after those estates had passed at the Reformation into other and lay hands. The tithes again which had been payable to religious houses became by statute payable to the Crown who granted them out from time to time to laymen, who provided clergy at very small stipends for the parishes, and used the bulk of the tithes as their own income, thus altogether diverting those tithes by this system of 'impropriation,' as it is called, from the use for which they were intended. Sir H. Spelman says that "these are now called 'impropriations' as being improperly in the hands of laymen," and that more than one-third of all the 10,000 parishes in England at that time had their tithes thus alienated from their proper and original use. The "Liber Regis" of 26 Henry VIII. gives in England and Wales 5,098 rectories, 3,687 vicarages, and 2,970 Churches neither rectorial nor vicarial: in all, 11,755 Churches in the 10,000 Parishes of A.D. 1535. "A very small proportion of the great tithes—those of corn, hay, and wood—remained in the hands of the clergy after the Reformation, all that were at that time valuable being transferred to the lay landholders; and the rectorial tithes now held by the clergy are the great tithes of lands that were then waste or worthless, but have since been improved." (Blunt, The Book of Church Law, p. 333).
The history of the augmentation of Cawthorne Living in 1615 may best be given in a copy of the Decree of the Court of Exchequer dated May nth, 1615, in the case of Brooke v. Waterhouse, the plaintiff being the Rev. John Brooke, S.T.P., Rector of Elmley, Precentor and Canon Residentiary of York, and Vicar of Silkstone, and the first defendant a son of Isaac Waterhouse, of Halifax, who held the priory manor of Barnsley, and bequeathed the tithes to his two sons by his will dated 31 Oct., 1609.
