Introduction

As indicated at the end of Chapter 1, the trust concept originated in English law in medieval times, chiefly as a result of the efforts of conveyancers to preserve the landholdings of their clients from certain forms of feudal taxation and to increase the range of dispositions of land which their clients could legally make on death. The emergence of the trust concept at this time is intimately bound up with the assumption of jurisdiction in legal matters by the Lord Chancellor, on grounds of ‘equity’. In time, as we will see, that jurisdiction became sufficiently pervasive and ordered so as to justify substituting an upper case ‘E’ in place of the lower case ‘e’. The development of Equity in that manner involves matters that range far beyond those concerning the trust. Since it is the latter that is our prime concern, the roles are reversed here and Equity therefore appears in our story mostly as a member of the supporting cast only.

This chapter seeks to explain the development of major segments of trusts law – specifically, the law governing private express trusts – from these early beginnings until, approximately, the beginning of the twentieth century. It does so with particular reference to the trust transactions which served, in various ways, to aggregate and safeguard privately held wealth for the benefit of members of a family and to ensure the smooth transmission of wealth from one generation of a family to the next.