Statute Of Uses Research Articles

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's Mirour de l'Omme

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's <i>Mirour de l'Omme</i>

‘By Fraud and Collusion’: Feudal Revenue and Enforcement of the Statute of Marlborough, 1267–1526

ABSTRACT Following the Statute of Marlborough 1267, feoffments which were designed to deprive lords of wardship could in some circumstances be deemed ‘collusive’ or ‘fraudulent’. This was further complicated from the mid-fourteenth century onwards by the common practice of creating uses to circumvent the common law rules prohibiting the devise of land by last will. The effect of uses being created to perform last wills was that lords, in particular the king, were losing out on their feudal incidents. The current view, put forward by legal historians, is that the Crown struggled to enforce the Statute of Marlborough after 1410, and that the ‘campaign’ against this loss of feudal revenue began in the 1520s. This article seeks to re-examine this view, particularly in relation to how Marlborough and collusion were understood and the Crown’s approach to the avoidance of feudal incidents before the Statute of Uses 1536.

John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres by Gregory Kneidel

Reviewed by: John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres by Gregory Kneidel Anne James (bio) Gregory Kneidel. John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres. Duquesne UP, 2015, $59, cloth. In John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the Satyres, Gregory Kneidel provides a fresh perspective on Donne’s five-numbered satyres, which have been the subject of only one previous book-length study (M. Thomas Hester, Kind Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne’s Satyres, Duke UP, 1982). In contrast to previous scholars, who have generally paid [End Page 512] scant attention to Donne’s legal training, Kneidel argues in his introduction that Donne was vitally engaged “in the legal controversies that pitted an emergent Anglo-American common-law tradition against rival jurisdictions, most importantly equity, but also Roman civil and canon law (the ius commune), parliamentary legislation, and royal prerogative” (3). Dating the poems to the period of Donne’s employment with Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton (1598–1602), Kneidel asserts that Donne “consistently criticizes the rationalization, centralization, formalization, and secularization of the law” (19), in which the drafting of laws becomes increasingly divorced from their enforcement. Each subsequent chapter focuses on one poem, examining its critique of a particular aspect of this process. Chapter 1 contextualizes Satyre 1 within the culture of the Inns of Court, reading it as a foundation for the later poems’ critique of the secularization of the law, already beginning in the 1590s although not completed for another century. The poem’s opening establishes a “pre-secular conception of law according to which the very function of law is to bind together the spiritual and the physical, to conjoin the truths of theology and philosophy with the particulars of history and poetry, and ultimately to ‘knytt’ and preserve ‘together’ the corpus civilis mysticum” (26). However, Donne’s unsuccessful attempts to control his unruly acquaintance by demanding promises his companion cannot keep, like the Inns’ efforts to regulate student behaviour, expose the growing tensions between this ideal and a system that increasingly wants “to present itself as impartial, impersonal, and rational” by “closing itself off from sexual desire, humanist ethics, and the literary imagination” (33). In Satyre 2, which Kneidel argues stages the debate between law and equity in both content and structure, Donne focuses on estate law. Making a strong case for identifying Edward Coke and the queen as “analogs” (80) for Donne’s portraits of Coscus and his “Lady,” Kneidel proposes that the poem targets “the calculated alignment of Coke’s antiquarian legal ideology and Elizabeth’s parsimonious fiscal feudalism” (55). Successful lawyers like Coke and Coscus thwarted the intent of the 1536 Statute of Uses (27 Hen 8 c 10), which was to benefit the crown, using it instead to acquire lands and secure permanent ownership within their own families. Although such unethical practices disadvantaged all hereditary landowners, their impact upon Catholic families like Donne’s was particularly severe. Donne’s primary concern, however, was to demonstrate the dangers being posed by a [End Page 513] legal system in which “the men who profited most from the system also built and regulated it” (67). In his reading of Satyre 3, Kneidel turns to “the legal role of paternal and state authority in enforcing marriage contracts and, by analogy, in assuring religious conformity” (86). English marriage law attempted to balance Roman law, which granted parents’ absolute authority over their children, with medieval canon law, which protected children from coercion in marriage negotiations, fearing that unqualified support for liberty of conscience could also justify political rebellion. Similarly, Elizabeth’s government enforces membership in the English church, despite recognizing the sacred and ultimately unknowable relationship between the individual and God, a dilemma Donne enacts by charging his reader both to “Seeke true religion” (l. 44) and to ask advice from a father. This discussion contributes to Kneidel’s theme that Donne recognizes the problems of a system in transition: should contracting a marriage or choosing a religion require a judicious application of the principle of equity or should officials apply inflexible laws? Although critics have generally assumed...

A Study of the Taxation, Tax Resistances, and Inheritors in King Henry VIII

The first noticeable action in King Henry VIII begins by the news of ‘loud rebellion’(29) in Act 1, scene 2. This was a tax strike against heavy taxation, called “Amicable Grant”(1525) that Thomas Wolsey imposed to solve the financial difficulties of Henry VIII who wanted to have costly wars with France. Discontent and exasperation burst forth across the England because the forced ‘Loans’(1522-3) had not been repaid and the ‘Subsidy’(1523) was still being collected. In Suffolk, around 10,000 protesters gathered, and finally King granted a “free pardon to each man that has denied”(1.2.100) to pay the tax and cancelled it. This failure, however, brought about Wolsey’s downfall before long and made the disappointed king seek for other methods to secure tax revenues. After Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell led the tax policies of Henry’s government. Cromwell made ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus’, an evaluation report on the church properties, and submitted the bills of Statute of Uses, Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1535 & Suppression of Religious Houses Act 1539, in succession. All the monasteries and their properties in England and Wales dissolved by two Suppression Acts were sold off through the Augmentation Court to fund Henry’s military campaigns in the 1540s. The disposed lands enhanced the social status of the gentry who purchased the lands. These processes are strewn in the characters and dialogues of the work which I tried to find them out. At the last scene of this work, another heir(5.4.41) of Elizabeth who is Henry’s heir is described as “a mountain cedar”(53). This image of a cedar reminds the audience of the tree whose twigs, “bark” and “timber” were “hacked”(96) and suffered by heavy taxation in Act I, scene 2. Through merging the “every tree”(1.2.96) into the “every man”(5.4.33) who shall eat and sing “[u]nder his own vine” and into “[o]ur children’s children” who will “be and make new nations”(5.4.54, 52) by and with the cedar, Shakespeare makes them all the inheritors of King Henry.

The Authority of Parliament and the Scope of the Statute of Uses 1536

Drawing upon evidence from early-sixteenth-century Chancery pleadings, this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the framing of the Statute of Uses 1536. It looks, not backwards from later unexecuted uses or trusts, but forwards from evidence of practice in creating uses in the decades immediately before 1536, so as to assess the intentions of those responsible for the statute and the extent to which it was foreseen that the statute would not execute some types of uses, and that such types of uses would in practice continue to be created, suggesting that, aside from its effect upon feoffments to the uses of a last will, the intended consequences of the statute were less far-reaching than may have been supposed.

Wills, Trusts and Trusting from the Statute of Uses to Lord Nottingham

Medieval feoffments to the uses of a last will provided, in effect, a power to devise freehold land, otherwise generally impossible at common law. The Statute of Uses 1536 put an end to this mechanism, and in 1540 the Statute of Wills provided, within limits, a substitute power to devise. But conveyances inter vivos upon trust for the performance of wills continued to be made after 1540; and the distinction in practice between such trusts and wills was less clear than might be supposed: wills under the statutory power were understood as conveyances; executors were frequently trustees in a narrow sense; and the perception that executors were, in a broader sense, trusted, had substantive effects. In understanding wills, trusts and trusting after the Statute of Uses, distinctions between those who are ‘trustees’ and those who are not, or between conveyances upon trust and wills, may be an essential starting-point in bringing order to the sources, but cannot fully reflect the complexity of contemporary arrangements.

Trusts for Secrecy: The Case of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland

It is the purpose of this article to draw attention to the case of Dudley v. Ellis (1559), * discovered in the record of the Court of Chancery while searching for trust cases in the years after the Statute of Uses. Together with the now famous case of Bertie v. Herenden (1560),1Dudley v. Ellis provides a vivid illustration of the role which trusts might play in times of trouble.

Marriage Settlements, 1601-1740: The Adoption of the Strict Settlement

1. The medieval inheritance and the Statute of Uses 2. Law in transition: the conflict over restraints upon alienation 3. Patterns of marriage settlement 1601-1659: the development of the 'life estate-entail' mode 4. The emergence of the strict settlement 5. The adoption of the strict settlement 1660-1740: Kent and Northamptonshire 6. Marriage settlements in perspective: the social and economic aspects.

Francis Moore's Reading on The Statute of Charitable Uses

The reading was an integral part of the education of the medieval law student, and a necessary exercise for the utter barrister who cast covetous eyes to the Bench of his Inn, the Order of the Coif and a judgeship in the Common Pleas or King's Bench. At one time each reader discoursed on one of the “old” statutes before Edward III (especially Magna Carta, Merton, Marlborough, Westminster I, Gloucester and Westminster II) but during the sixteenth century readers acquired a wider range of choice; so Coke and Bacon were to read on the Statute of Uses 1535 and Moore on the Statute of Charitable Uses 1601. The “antient readings” are said to have served the apprentices well, particularly as an introduction to the dark intricacies of medieval land law. Coke esteemed them as having five excellent qualities:First, they declared what the common law was before the making of the statute, as here it appeareth. Secondly, they opened the true sense and meaning of the statute. Thirdly, their cases were briefe, having at the most one poynt of the common law and another upon the statute. Fourthly, plaine and perspicuous, for then the honour of the reader was to excell others in authorities, arguments, and reasons for proofe of his opinion, and for confutation of the objections against it. Fifthly, they read, to suppresse subtill inventions to creepe out of the statute.How more favourable than their modern counterparts, mused Coke, whichhaving lost the said former qualities, have lost also their former authorities: for now the cases are long, obscure, and intricate, full of new conceits, liker rather to riddles than lectures, which when they are opened they vanish away like smoke, and the readers are like to lapwings, who seeme to bee neerest their nests, when they are farthest from them, and all their studie is to find nice evasions out of the statute.

The genesis of the Statute of Uses

The genesis of the Statute of Uses

The Revival of Equitable Estates in the Seventeenth Century: An Explanation by Lord Nottingham

The purpose of this article is to give an explanation reported by Lord Nottingham about three-quarters of the way through the seventeenth century of the legal reasons justifying the resurrection of equitable estates by way of trusts after the Statute of Uses in 1535 had gone a long distance towards extirpating equitable estates in land. This explanation turns to a large degree on a restrictive interpretation of the first section of the Act, which is as follows—“That where any person or persons…at any time hereafter shall…be seised, of and in any…hereditaments, to the use confidence or trust of any other person or persons or of any body politic, by…any…means whatsoever,…in every such case all and every such person or persons and bodies politic that…shall have any such use confidence or trust…shall…be…deemed and adjudged in lawful estate seisin and possession of and in the same…hereditaments,…to all intents constructions and purposes in the law, of and in such like estates as they had or shall have in use trust or confidence of or in the same.”

The Statute of Uses and the Power to Devise

It is commonly stated that one of the many effects of the Statute of Uses, 1535, was that the power of devising land which had been acquired by means of uses was abolished. It has also been said that this power ‘would subsequently have been recovered through that construction of the Statute which afterwards gave rise to the modern system of trusts’,i.e.by the enforcement of a use upon a use as a trust. The object of this article is to suggest that on the construction of the Statute which became generally accepted by the Courts the Statute never in fact made it impossible to make what was in effect a devise by means of a use, but augmented the power to devise by making it possible to pass the legal estate; and further, that this fact was recognized long before the Restoration when uses upon a use were first regularly enforced as trusts.

The Repeal of the Statute of Uses

The Repeal of the Statute of Uses

The Statute of Uses and Active Trusts

The Statute of Uses and Active Trusts

Uses before the Statute of Uses

Uses before the Statute of Uses

The Political Causes Which Shaped the Statute of Uses

The Political Causes Which Shaped the Statute of Uses

The Statute of Uses and the Modern Deed

The Statute of Uses and the Modern Deed

An Essay on Uses and Trusts, and on the Nature and Operation of Conveyances at Common Law, and of Those Which Derive Their Effect from the Statute of Uses

An Essay on Uses and Trusts, and on the Nature and Operation of Conveyances at Common Law, and of Those Which Derive Their Effect from the Statute of Uses