A Swiss canton on its own since 1803, Vaud has actually been part of the Swiss Confederation since 1536, but as conquered territory belonging to the City of Bern. By conquest, its suzerainty went from the House of Savoy to the Bernese patricians. At the same time, Reformation was imposed, leading to the secularisation of all goods and revenues of the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, and until the Revolution of 1798, the majority of all the tithe rights belonged to the new power, thus submitting Vaud’s crop production to its own agricultural policy.

As soon as Vaud was conquered, the Bernese State was confronted with the old customs, choosing to deal with them rather than abolishing them. It inventoried them, codified them and influenced them with its own legislative will. It pursued the unification of the legal system with constancy, using law rather than imposing. Its obstinate legalism certainly preserved it from popular upheavals, even if did not avoid grudges and local resistance.

The same goes for the tithe and its capital importance for the Public Treasure. Using trials and sovereign judgement, the tithe legislation managed to distinguish lasting habits from particular or consensual abuse as far as imposition, franchise and perception goes. With its case law, it will manage to limit fraud and specifities, without eliminating a certain degree of vagueness, typical of the time.

The accounting of the Bernese bailiffs are the principal source for the present research on the tithe in Vaud. In 615 volumes – 3'969 annual reports, they nearly cover the whole of the Ancien Regime, while following common accounting rules, which gives them a great coherence. A number of state directives will standardize even further the organisation of the different sections, the precision of the accounting and a certain structure of the annual balance sheet, though without completely standardising the accounting system. The simple economic common sense will forbid any radical changes to the management of the public finances, which were smartly adapted to local customs. For example, the multitude of local units of capacity is probably the most emblematic popular resistance against centralisation.

Succeeding both to the duchy of Savoy and to the Roman Catholic Church provided the city of Berne with a large loot of rights, which it had to list, sort out and describe as they best fitted its own economical interests. The successive modifications of tax bases and competences required a great deal of effort and work on the part of the Bernese administration to finally have a cadastral overleaping of fiefs, jurisdiction and tithe in the second half of the XVIIIth century. From one modification to another, the erosion policy – or make haste slowly – improved the public rights to the detriment of the private ones and provided the necessary cohesion to the sensible collection of feudal, seigneurial and tithe taxes.

Given the notion that raw data has a longer life than its analysis, it seemed important to publish all the data collected in the accounting of the bailiffs from the XVIth to the XVIIIth century, or even better, the complete chronological series, which can be immediately used for further analysis. For this reason, the numerous regional measures of grain capacity have been converted into hectolitres and then, for pure statistical ornament, into quintals.