Monday 6 April 2015

A-Z Challenge 2015: E is for Easter Book

Try searching for this on the internet, and you will be swamped with links to children's tales, pictures of the Easter bunny, how to make a tie-dyed boiled egg - almost everything except a definition of an Easter Book.


http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com
An Easter Book, in genealogical/historical terms, was a list of all the householders in a parish - especially those liable for tithes! (one-tenth of your income)  These would be paid to the local priest at - you've guessed it! - Easter.  

As you can imagine, such a list would be very useful to a genealogist, giving names from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.  You could also work out a) how well-off (or not) the parishioners were, and b) how well-off (or not) the parish itself was.


Great Coxwell Tithe Barn
Great Coxwell Tithe Barn
courtesy ballista


© 2015 Ros Haywood. All Rights Reserved

4 comments:

  1. Haven't heard of this before but it would certainly be very useful for pre-18th century records - I wonder how many of them still exist - as I expect many were simply thrown away when churches were having clear outs?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I never knew that. I know about tithing but not that it was given at Easter-the priests must have loved this time:) It would be a great way to research names

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you, ros, for this information - the term Easter Book was new to me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I didn't know that is what those were called, I knew of the lists, but that is very cool. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete

Copyright

You may NOT use the contents of this site for commercial purposes without explicit written permission from the author and blog owner. Commercial purposes includes blogs with ads and income generating features, and/or blogs or sites using feed content as a replacement for original content. Full content usage is not permitted.

You Might Also Be Interested In

Total Pageviews

Blog Archive