VII - The Mortmain Act, 1736

Summary

The background to the Act

The years between 1730 and 1750 have been said to mark a ‘low ebb of public decency, order and principle’. They saw the climax of an anti-clerical movement which had been gathering momentum since the Hanoverian succession and which manifested itself in public insult of the Church and calumny of the clergy. ‘Since the days of the Lollards’, wrote Mark Pattison, ‘there had never been a time when the established ministers of religion were held in so much contempt as in the Hanoverian period, or when satire upon churchmen was so congenial to general feeling. The laity feared the wealth of the Church; they feared that great ecclesiastical charities, like Queen Anne's Bounty, whose constitution allowed it to receive any amount of property, ‘the statute of mortmain … notwithstanding’, would garner in all the land of the kingdom; they feared the power of prelates, like Edmund Gibson; and they feared that the clergy would emulate what they thought to be the example of their medieval predecessors and terrorise them into making death-bed devises ad pias causas to the ruin of their heirs.

These deep-seated apprehensions inspired the Mortmain Bill, which the Master of the Rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll, introduced in the House of Commons on 5 March 1735. It was proposed that after a stated day no land or any sum of money for the purchase of land should be given to any person or body corporate in trust for, or for the benefit of any charitable purpose, unless it was made by deed executed in the presence of two or more witnesses twelve calendar months before the grantor's death.