During the
Middle Ages in Western European countries such as
England, the
Roman Catholic Church acquired a substantial amount of real estate. As the Church and religious orders were each recognised as a
legal person separate from the office holder who administered the Church land (such as the abbot or the bishop), the land would not
escheat on the death of the holder, or pass by inheritance, as the Church and the religious orders would not die. The land was held in perpetuity. This was in contrast to feudal practice in which the nobility would hold land granted by the king in return for service, especially service in war. Over time, the Church gained a large share of land in many feudal states; this was a cause of increasing tension between the Church and
the Crown. In 1279, and again in 1290,
Statutes of Mortmain were enacted under
King Edward I to impose limits on the Church's holding of property, although limits on the Church's power to hold land are also found in earlier statutes, including
Magna Carta (1215) and the
Provisions of Westminster (1259). The broad effect of these provisions was that the authorisation of the Crown was needed before the land could vest perpetually in a corporation. As an example of the response of the institutions, the
chartulary of
Chertsey Abbey records that "shortly after one of these statutes vulgarly called Mortmain" in
Ash, Surrey, were held by Robert de Zathe with sufficient common pasture for his flocks and herds, while Geoffrey de Bacsete and his brother William had . Corporate mortmain is legal in most countries today. In a person's making of their own trusts, provisions and settlements, to newly proposed founded bodies or groups of persons, there are commonly still laws against perpetuities, preventing their "dead hand" from prevailing more than, for example, 80 years away and there is the common law rule in
Saunders v Vautier enabling all of the adult beneficiaries to draw special legal agreements together to override any historic provisions. See
rule against perpetuities—rules vary by jurisdiction. Mortmain was a key underlying interdiction in legal history, contextualising much early case law. The decision of
Thornton v Howe (1862) 31 Beav 14 held that a
trust for publishing the writings of
Joanna Southcott was
charitable, being for the "advancement of religion". This decision is often held up as setting the bar extremely low in determining whether a charity is for the advancement of religion. At the time of her trust-making the statutes against mortmain were in force (pre-dating the
Law of Property Amendment Act 1860 piloted by
Lord Cozens-Hardy) and having not met the narrow, high-authority formalities for such a trust to be valid it was
void, rather than imbuing it with special privileges in relation to taxation and viability. Identifying the trust within the general run of mortmain forbiddance shapes the case's
reasoning (ratio). ==Etymology==