from parliament the Act in Restraint of Annates, which restored the annates as a payment owed to the Crown. A new valuation was established by the commissioners who wrote the King's Books () in 1535. In February 1704, they were granted by Queen Anne to the assistance of the poorer clergy, a scheme since known as "Queen Anne's Bounty". The 1535 valuations were still in use in 1704, and their continued use was inherent in the Act setting up Queen Anne's Bounty; consequently the 'first fruits' payments did not increase to reflect the true value of livings; by 1837, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners reported first fruits to bring in £4,000-5,000 a year whereas church income was around £3m a year and the true value of first fruits would therefore have been over £150,000 a year. In Scotland, the annat or ann is half a year's stipend allowed to the executors of a minister of the Church of Scotland above what was due to him at the time of his death. This is neither assignable by the clergyman during his life nor can it be seized by his creditors. France In France, in spite of royal edicts and even denunciations of the Sorbonne, at least the custom of paying the servitia communia held its ground until the infamous decree of August 4 during the French Revolution in 1789. Germany In Germany, it was decided by the concordat of Constance, in 1418, that bishoprics and abbacies should pay the servitia according to the valuation of the Roman chancery in two half-yearly instalments. Those reserved benefices only were to pay the annalia which were rated above twenty-four gold florins; and as none were so rated, whatever their annual value may have been, the annalia fell into disuse. A similar convenient fiction also led to their practical abrogation in France, Spain and Belgium. The council of Basel (1431–1443) wished to abolish the servitia, but the concordat of Vienna (1448) confirmed the Constance decision. Politically, the collection was opposed by Martin Luther his 1520 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in which he wrote: The practice of collecting servitia continued through the Reformation, in spite of the efforts of the congress of Ems (1786) to alter it, still remains nominally in force. As a matter of fact, however, the revolution caused by the secularization of the ecclesiastical states in 1803 practically put an end