Statutes of Mortmain

The Statutes of Mortmain were two enactments, in 1279 (Statutum de Viris Religiosis, 7 Edw. 1) and 1290 (Quia Emptores, 18 Edw. 1), passed in the reign of Edward I of England, aimed at preserving the kingdom's revenues by preventing land from passing into the possession of the Church. Possession of property by a corporation such as the Church was known as mortmain, literally "dead hand". In medieval England, feudal estates generated taxes for the King (known as feudal incidents), principally on the grant or inheritance of the estate. If an estate became owned by a religious corporation which could never die, could never attain majority, and could never be attainted for treason, these taxes never became payable. It was akin to the estates being owned by the dead, hence the term.

The Statutes of Mortmain were meant to re-establish the prohibition against donating land to the Church for the purpose of avoiding feudal services, a prohibition which had originated in Magna Carta in 1215 and was specifically defined in its 1217 issue. But King John, the original signatory of Magna Carta, died the following year, and his son, Henry III, did not enforce the proscriptions and, to the contrary, showed great deference to the Church.

Henry's son, Edward I, desired to re-establish the precedent set by the 1215 and 1217 issues of Magna Carta. The Statutes of Mortmain thus provided that no estate could be granted to a corporation without royal consent. However, these statutes proved ineffective in practice, and the problem of Church lands persisted, due to the development of the device of the cestui que use, which side-stepped the royal courts and began – in the ecclesiastical courts – the development of the law of trusts, which separated the legal ownership from the right of occupation or use of land. The issue was only finally resolved in 1535, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, confiscating all monastic lands for the Crown, though the bishops remained endowed with much land.