Introduction

A ‘trust’ in English law is in some measure the translation into legal terms of the word ‘trust’ as used in ordinary speech. Its conceptual starting-point is ‘a confidence reposed in some other’ (this phrase is from the sixteenth-century legal commentaries of Lord Chief Justice Coke). The ‘confidence’ so reposed gives rise to moral obligations to which the courts, aided by the legislature, have purported to develop legal parallels. Inevitably, the moral weight given to trust and trusteeship in ordinary usage – to be ‘in breach’ of a ‘sacred trust’ is a serious matter, with repercussions possibly in the next world as well as this one – has had a significant impact on both the scope and the content of trusts law principles. There are still some contexts in which it may be difficult to say whether the word ‘trust’ is used in a legal or purely moral sense.

Yet this is by no means the whole story of trusts law. In the early twentieth century the historian and jurist F W Maitland praised the trust (see Equity (2nd edn, 1936) p 23 and Selected Historical Essays(1936) p 129); he regarded ‘the development from century to century of the trust idea’ as ‘the greatest and most distinctive achievement performed by Englishmen in the field of jurisprudence’. But this was not because the trust embodied basic ethical principles but rather because of its versatility.