glebe

1. A plot of land belonging or yielding profit to an English parish church or an ecclesiastical office.
2. Archaic. The soil or earth; land.

[Latin glēba, clod.]

Glebe was a portion of land allocated to support a priest. Though originally it was intended as the sole support, it soon required substantial augmentation, usually through tithes.

Glebes were lands set aside for the clergy by American colonists, consistent with English tradition. The proprietors of townships in the New England colonies, in drawing lots for their land, reserved a share for a minister for his support. The presence of a minister, they reasoned, would induce people to migrate to the new community. The minister's allotment could be substantial—as much as four lots of 100 acres each, one for his farm and three that he could sell or rent. Whereas New England glebes generally passed into private ownership in the first generation of the community's development, in the South, notably in Virginia, glebes ranging from 100 to 250 acres were intended as permanent farms for the support of the ministers of the established church and could be rented but not sold. Members of churches other than the established church resented having to contribute to the purchase of glebes, however. Those opposed to the institution in Virginia, spurred by a wave of evangelical revivals in the area, succeeded in 1802 in securing the adoption of the Sequestration Act, which provided for the sale of glebes by the overseers of the poor for the benefit of the indigent. Not geared to reliance on the voluntary contributions of members as were other churches, the Episcopal Church was weakened by the new law. In other southern states the glebes remained in the hands of the church and were sometimes worked by ministers whose incomes were small or by tenants.

Bibliography

Hall, David D. The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

—Paul W. Gates/A. R.

For other uses, see Glebe (disambiguation).

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Detail of a generic map of a mediaeval manor. The demesne was land held by the lord in the manorial land system; the glebe were fields held by the incumbent of the benefice

In the Roman Catholic and Anglican church traditions, a glebe was an area of land belonging to a benefice.^{[citation needed]} This was property (in addition to the parsonage house and grounds) which was assigned to support the priest.^[1] Glebe included a wide variety of properties including farms, individual fields, shops, houses, factories etc. An incumbent was entitled to retain the glebe for his own use if he wished (for instance, some incumbents farmed their own land) or he could let it and any income formed part of the stipend.

Glebe associated with the Church of England ceased to belong to individual incumbents as from 1 April 1978, by virtue of the Endowments and Glebe Measure 1976; instead, it became vested on that date, "without any conveyance or other assurance," in the Diocesan Board of Finance of the diocese to which the benefice owning the glebe belonged, even if the glebe was in another diocese. From 1571 onwards, Church of England glebe was listed in a document called a glebe terrier, compiled by the incumbent of the benefice.

Contents 1 United States 2 See also 3 References 4 Sources

United States

In the American colonies of Great Britain where the Church of England was the established religion, glebe land was distributed by the colonial government, and was often farmed or rented out by the church rector to cover living expenses. This practice was no longer observed following the disestablishment of state churches that accompanied the American Revolution. The many roads in the eastern United States and other former British colonial possessions that bear this name once ran past a church glebe property.^{[citation needed]}

See also

Look up Glebe in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Demesne
• Manorialism
•  "Glebe". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Glebe. 
•  "Glebe". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

References

1. ^ Coredon Dictionary of Medieval Terms p. 140

Sources

• Coredon, Christopher (2007). A Dictionary of Medieval Terms & Phrases (Reprint ed.). Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. ISBN 978-1-74384-138-8. 

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