Load up Deacons!

NaphtaliPress said:
Somewhere, sometime, you know you've thought of this.
Click to expand...

Yes.

Fact stranger than fiction.

In early New England, there was a church "officer" called the tythingman. Among his duties was keeping churchgoers from dozing off. He had a pole with a feather at one end to wake sleeping or distracted women. On the other end was a brass ball to get the men's attention.

tythingman.jpg ​

Here's some more information from Gemini:

In 17th- and 18th-century Puritan New England, a tithingman (or tythingman) was an elected local officer tasked with enforcing public morality, church discipline, and strict Sabbath observance.

The title derived from the old Anglo-Saxon tithing system—where a community was divided into groups of ten families held mutually accountable for law and order. In colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and neighboring colonies, the General Court formalized the role to ensure towns maintained both civil and spiritual discipline.

Key Responsibilities​

  • Maintaining Order in the Meetinghouse: Puritan Sunday services were compulsory, unheated in winter, and routinely lasted three to four hours. The tithingman sat in the gallery or paced the aisles holding a long wooden staff:
    • One end featured a hard knob or brass tip to rap misbehaving boys or sharply poke sleeping men.
    • The opposite end had a soft hare’s tail, fox tail, or feather used to gently brush the faces of sleeping women and children.
  • Neighborhood Moral Oversight: Each tithingman was assigned to monitor 10 to 12 neighboring households. They conducted regular home visits to verify that families maintained daily prayer, taught children the catechism, and were not harboring unauthorized strangers or idlers.
  • Sabbath Enforcement ("Blue Laws"): From sundown Saturday through Sunday evening, tithingmen patrolled roads, commons, and waterways to stop unnecessary travel, manual labor, excessive noise, or secular recreation.
  • Tavern and Inn Inspection: Tithingmen were empowered to search public houses without a warrant to ensure innkeepers were not serving alcohol during church hours, harboring disorderly patrons, or permitting unlawful gambling.
As secular civil governance expanded and church and state gradually decoupled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the tithingman's policing duties were absorbed by municipal constables and local police.
 
I still try to convince my superiors at the Regent University library to allow me to use a nerf gun to deal with overly-loud patrons…I can sympathize with the deacons!
 
Naphtali Press Memes. The memes we didn't ask for, but desperately need.

(we may need to have an intervention soon regarding his infatuation with AI)
 
Ed Walsh said:
Yes.

Fact stranger than fiction.

In early New England, there was a church "officer" called the tythingman. Among his duties was keeping churchgoers from dozing off. He had a pole with a feather at one end to wake sleeping or distracted women. On the other end was a brass ball to get the men's attention.


Here's some more information from Gemini:

In 17th- and 18th-century Puritan New England, a tithingman (or tythingman) was an elected local officer tasked with enforcing public morality, church discipline, and strict Sabbath observance.

The title derived from the old Anglo-Saxon tithing system—where a community was divided into groups of ten families held mutually accountable for law and order. In colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and neighboring colonies, the General Court formalized the role to ensure towns maintained both civil and spiritual discipline.

Key Responsibilities​

  • Maintaining Order in the Meetinghouse: Puritan Sunday services were compulsory, unheated in winter, and routinely lasted three to four hours. The tithingman sat in the gallery or paced the aisles holding a long wooden staff:
    • One end featured a hard knob or brass tip to rap misbehaving boys or sharply poke sleeping men.
    • The opposite end had a soft hare’s tail, fox tail, or feather used to gently brush the faces of sleeping women and children.
  • Neighborhood Moral Oversight: Each tithingman was assigned to monitor 10 to 12 neighboring households. They conducted regular home visits to verify that families maintained daily prayer, taught children the catechism, and were not harboring unauthorized strangers or idlers.
  • Sabbath Enforcement ("Blue Laws"): From sundown Saturday through Sunday evening, tithingmen patrolled roads, commons, and waterways to stop unnecessary travel, manual labor, excessive noise, or secular recreation.
  • Tavern and Inn Inspection: Tithingmen were empowered to search public houses without a warrant to ensure innkeepers were not serving alcohol during church hours, harboring disorderly patrons, or permitting unlawful gambling.
As secular civil governance expanded and church and state gradually decoupled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the tithingman's policing duties were absorbed by municipal constables and local police.
Click to expand...
Bring back the tythingman
 
I’ve noticed these days the issue isn’t so much sleeping rather it is yakking. Airsoft/paintball my kids or anybody else won’t be quiet! :banghead:
 
Wish I could say I haven’t seen it in mine, but alas…it’s not frequent, I’ll say that. It’s just a handful of folk who come and go. I wouldn’t consider them members necessarily, even.
 
He's right. The tythingman was real.

The Congregational church in which I grew up put on an annual Pilgrim Thanksgiving service, according to the order of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a (usually unsuccessful) effort to have unaccompanied psalmsinging. The tythingman, in full Puritan attire, was a staple of the service. Of course, he always found a person nodding off, whose presence would be publicly announced and either his head rapped with the brass ball or her nose tickled with the feather or rabbit foot. As far as I know, all the people "found sleeping" were actually church members who volunteered for the public singling out, and it was DEFINITELY public because the local TV stations would typically cover it, and the US Congressman representing Grand Rapids, unless unavoidably detained in Washington on business, would read the president's Thanksgiving Day proclamation, as would in fact have been done in Puritan New England by a representative of the civil magistrate.

That was one service per year when NOBODY was going to fall asleep!

Ed Walsh said:
Yes.

Fact stranger than fiction.

In early New England, there was a church "officer" called the tythingman. Among his duties was keeping churchgoers from dozing off. He had a pole with a feather at one end to wake sleeping or distracted women. On the other end was a brass ball to get the men's attention.


Here's some more information from Gemini:

In 17th- and 18th-century Puritan New England, a tithingman (or tythingman) was an elected local officer tasked with enforcing public morality, church discipline, and strict Sabbath observance.

The title derived from the old Anglo-Saxon tithing system—where a community was divided into groups of ten families held mutually accountable for law and order. In colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and neighboring colonies, the General Court formalized the role to ensure towns maintained both civil and spiritual discipline.

Key Responsibilities​

  • Maintaining Order in the Meetinghouse: Puritan Sunday services were compulsory, unheated in winter, and routinely lasted three to four hours. The tithingman sat in the gallery or paced the aisles holding a long wooden staff:
    • One end featured a hard knob or brass tip to rap misbehaving boys or sharply poke sleeping men.
    • The opposite end had a soft hare’s tail, fox tail, or feather used to gently brush the faces of sleeping women and children.
  • Neighborhood Moral Oversight: Each tithingman was assigned to monitor 10 to 12 neighboring households. They conducted regular home visits to verify that families maintained daily prayer, taught children the catechism, and were not harboring unauthorized strangers or idlers.
  • Sabbath Enforcement ("Blue Laws"): From sundown Saturday through Sunday evening, tithingmen patrolled roads, commons, and waterways to stop unnecessary travel, manual labor, excessive noise, or secular recreation.
  • Tavern and Inn Inspection: Tithingmen were empowered to search public houses without a warrant to ensure innkeepers were not serving alcohol during church hours, harboring disorderly patrons, or permitting unlawful gambling.
As secular civil governance expanded and church and state gradually decoupled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the tithingman's policing duties were absorbed by municipal constables and local police.
Click to expand...
 
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