Liberal Dictionary English Dictionary
noun
- Also called glebe land. Chiefly British. the cultivable land owned by a parish church or ecclesiastical benefice.
- Archaic. soil; field.
noun
- British land granted to a clergyman as part of his benefice
- poetic land, esp when regarded as the source of growing things
c.1300, from Old French glebe, from Latin gleba, glaeba “clod, lump of earth,” from PIE *glebh- “to roll into a ball” (cf. Latin globus “sphere;” Old English clyppan “to embrace;” Lithuanian glebys “armful,” globti “to embrace, support”). Earliest English sense is “land forming a clergyman’s benefice,” on notion of soil of the earth as source of vegetable products.