Regarded by contemporaries as "the chief dispute of our times," tithes were the subject of intense controversy in the 1650s. Ministers, reformers, radicals and sectarians all went into print to defend or destroy the clergy's right to a tenth of the produce of the land. Tithes pushed at the limits of private property, and both their opponents and their defenders recognised their significance for ownership, the law, liberty and individuality. This innovative and genuinely interdisciplinary study of the tithe disputes of the 1650s draws out their importance for understanding how people envisaged ownership--of the land, of labour, and of themselves--in seventeenth-century England. Through a range of pamphlets and tracts, the book explores the notions of the increase, husbandry, the construction of the commonwealth and of individual conscience and their central significance for the idea of property.