"Hands Off the Farmer!"

In Ashford, Kent one day last week, sturdy British husbandmen stood glowering while an auctioneer put up nine cows for sale. For the cattle no one bid a farthing. Presently the farmers formed a procession, moved down a Kent road shouting, singing, bearing effigies of homely Queen Anne and handsome Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. In the procession donkeys bore such placards as: "Queen Anne's Dead!" "The Parsons' Feet Have Been Under Our Table Too Long," "The Tithe Is the Death Watch Beetle Of Agriculture," "Archbishop of Cant. Church on Sunday but Hands Off the Farmer!" Spectators pelted the effigies with stones, clods, dung, mouldy mangel-wurzels. Then they burned them.

For hundreds of years British farmers have helped support the Church of England with tithes, no longer the Biblical tenth of produce but at a rate of less than $2 per acre per year. About -L-3,000,000 annually is collected in tithes, two-thirds in "Queen Anne's Bounty," an organization set up in that good lady's reign (1702-14) to support rural clergy. Of the thousands of husbandmen who in the past four years have rebelled against tithe-paying (TIME, Aug. 14, 1933), none have been more stubborn than the men of Kent. Last February a London Express man found scores of them locked & barred in their homes, ready to repel bailiffs.

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