Tithe End

Tithe End is one of the continuous settlements of the valleys, a village that never ceased through the ruin. Godwin of Merefield, writing in about 4046, already counted it a standard example of the unbroken villages, and it carries their marks: weathered stones in the churchyard, an unaccountable boundary and observances nobody can date. Its best-known daughter is Dame Editha of Tithe End, whose A Countrey Womannes Boke of Petitions was written around 4211 and is still quoted, on waiting in the chapter's archway, on the valley households that shelter what Oxford casts out, on the difference between bound and free families, and on Sarrum's thin supply of priests.

It is one of the three largest tithe villages, with Merefield and Little Oswin, a place of four to seven hundred people with a church, a modest school, an inn, a smithy and a share in a mill. Its constable lives in the village and is the parish's officer, though in practice he answers to the Halden bailiff. One bell carries to all three villages, and their quarrel over the mowing has outlasted four incumbents; there are older disputes too, over water, boundaries, a living's patronage and a right of way.

The vestry of Tithe End is respected enough that Roger Malle, bailiff of the Halden estates, gave a deposition before it in 4609. He told it that because the great barns are the duke's, any rot in them counts first as an accusation and only afterwards as a loss, and that a mile of unclaimed waste between the hanger woods and the ploughland holds perhaps two hundred people in the county, most of them born there. Dame Editha wrote that she knew where three of the valley's refuge households stood, and that she never had and never would set it down; where they stood, she kept to herself.

A company hired at Tithe End over the mowing or the water is hired against the other two villages as well. Visitors are sized up within the hour by clothes, speech and whether they came on foot.