This book starts with a ‘micro history’ referred to in the newspapers in 1934 as ‘the battle of the ducks’. Revd Roderick Kedward, a Methodist minister and president of the National Tithepayers Association, owed money to the Church of England Commissioners and Queen Anne’s Bounty (originally established in 1704 to fund poor clergy) on account of non-payment of tithes. The Church had set up a company, General Dealers, to act as its enforcers. Members of the Association thwarted attempts by the company to remove stock over which a court order had been obtained and took the ducks back to Kedward’s farm in Kent. The press told of fights with police and company men that included a former army heavyweight boxing champion. Canterbury was a major centre for such discontent and the archbishop, Cosmo Gordon Lang, kept up to date with events ‘by perusing newspaper cuttings’ (p. xviii). The following year he and Queen Anne were burnt in effigy by irate farmers who followed this up by holding a mock inquest which found that the pair ‘had met a just death for robbery with violence on the farms and small-holdings of England’ (p. 269). The Gaumont company put footage of all this on cinema newsreels.

This book covers England and Wales, but most of the detail comes from the south and east of England and the author indicates there is space for a more detailed study of Wales, where the Church was disestablished in 1920. The countryside has been somewhat marginalised in modern British history, since by this time it represented a small and declining share of national wealth. This was a curious rural revolt but also one of considerable historical significance. Tithe – the term referred to a tenth – originated in the Anglo-Saxon period when to give a proportion of produce made sense in a world of rigid social bonds and limited monetisation. It made considerably less sense in the early 1930s when 70 per cent of the land in England and Wales was still subject to tithe. Part of the problem lay in the fact that, as a result of the suppression of the monasteries during the Reformation, substantial numbers of lay landowners with no obligation to good causes had also obtained the right to tithe. Agitation on the issue waxed and waned such that pro- and anti-tithe factionism fed into Cromwell’s Protectorate and was one of the factors that strengthened advocates of the restoration of the monarchy.

The Tithe Commutation Act 1836 replaced the provisioning of produce in kind with cash payments (but only after five previous bills had failed in parliament). Such attempts at modernisation, then and later, had difficult passages into law because they ran up against the defence of ownership rights. In legal terms the right to tithe was a form of property that could be – and was – bought and sold. The impact on those involved bears some similarity with the position of individuals snared in the recent scandal of houses being sold leasehold and who were thereby obligated to pay ground rent on the underlying land. Tithe, of course, was not originally intended as a profitable commodity but its use, even when it continued to support good causes such as support for poor clergy, was not always obvious to those asked to pay it. Discontent over such issues was, not surprisingly, liable to flare at times of agricultural depression such as the 1880s, when a lively campaign was mounted against the enforcement of the ‘extraordinary tithe’ that was applied to hop and fruit production. This resulted in the Tithe Act (1891) which allowed for reductions in payment in cases of hardship.

Tithe in its conventional form was also problematic for its owners since its level was related to the productive value of the land. A further tithe act, passed in 1918, aimed to remedy this by allowing the conversion of tithe rentcharge into a fixed annuity payable for a set period of time. Enforcing payment remained a problem on a local basis and, to try to fix this problem, yet another tithe bill, that of 1925, constituted Queen Anne’s Bounty as a centralised body for the collection of payments. Almost immediately, however, a new agricultural downturn led to a renewed wave of anti-tithe agitation. The Church of England responded by setting up a business called General Dealers – discreetly referred to in official correspondence as ‘the company’ – to carry out the work of physical enforcement such as confiscating ducks.

The high point of the conflict in the early 1930s saw John Maynard Keynes, England’s greatest economic theoretician, intervene to try to settle the problem once and for all. Ancient university colleges, going back to rights granted to Merton College by King Edward i in 1268, were holders of tithe rights on such a scale that they amounted to 25 per cent of the external income of Trinity College, Cambridge. When Keynes was bursar of King’s College, Cambridge, he enthusiastically supported the work of General Dealers, but by the time he was called upon to contribute to a Royal Commission on the subject in 1934–5 he had changed his mind. In his then view all tithes should now be converted into annuities for a fixed period of time (such as seventy-six years) and be capped below the previous level. This compromise was adopted in the ensuing Tithe Act (1936), which provided owners of tithe rights with compensation in the form of government bonds. Queen Anne’s Bounty duly became a kind of financial management organisation and merged in 1948 with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to form the Church Commissioners. The Finance Act (1977) finally extinguished all tithe annuities but left another medieval curiosity, chancel repair liabilities, as a continuing hazard on the freehold property market.

This book is a kind of economic history, but its author’s passionate attention is often turned more towards politics, with a strong focus on legal practice. There is also, particularly in the later chapters, some fascinating discussion of rural popular culture in relation to the staging of mock trials, burning of effigies and rough music. The theme of British medievalism in both its conservative and radical forms could have been developed a bit further, bearing in mind that most European states had already got rid of tithes during the long nineteenth century. What Bulaitis does demonstrate very well is that the opposition to traditional social and economic privilege led to an intertwining of left-wing radicalism, originally derived from non-conformist hostility to the Anglican establishment, and right-wing volkishness. This reflected the political career of Oswald Mosley who moved from the Conservatives to Labour before founding his New Party in 1930, which was to become the British Union of Fascists two years later. Local Fascist groups joined in enthusiastically in support of tithepayers, most of whom, it should be emphasised, were not the rural poor but a middling class of landowning farmers.

Getting reforms through parliament relied on parallel moves on the part of the Conservative Party to identify itself not merely with the social elite but also with the rights of property in general and agrarian values as the supposed bedrock of Englishness. This, however, laid open the path to eugenicist thought on the unity of land and race. Attitudes within the Church of England could have been explored in a bit more detail but Bulaitis does note that moves toward a broader social base for the Church, paralleling those made by the Conservatives, may have also contributed to a mood more aligned toward appeasement of the agitators. In the process greater threats, such as the wider disendowment and disestablishment of the Church of England, were left to one side as issues to be dealt with at an unspecified later date.