VIII - The Preamble to the Charitable Uses Act, 1601, and the Definition of Charity

Summary

The preamble to the Charitable Uses Act, 1601, did not seek to describe the objects which were charitable in law. The uses which were deemed to be within the equity of the statute were those whose endowments could materially contribute to the relief of poverty. Other charitable uses, such as those for the support of religious purposes, were outside the statute and had been enforced not by the charity commissioners but by an information brought by the Attorney-General at the relation of a private individual. The information, however, proved to be such an attractive procedure that by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to be used to enforce all charitable trusts. It was no longer

confined to cases considered as chanties before the statute of charitable uses, but all others are taken to be within the extensiveness of this proceeding in the name of the Attorney-General.

Thereafter the antithesis between charities enforceable by commission on the one hand and by information on the other gradually disappeared. No obstacle now remained to the formulation of a definition of legal charity which was not bedevilled by procedural distinctions. Not until 1804, in Morice v. The Bishop of Durham however, was this step taken and the preamble to the Charitable Uses Act, 1601, equated with the legal definition of charity.