What on earth is a Trust and a Trustee anyway?

The nights are drawing in, Halloween has gone, fireworks are upcoming and Christmas is on the horizon, which means it’s almost Trustee Week.

Actually, thinking about it what is Trustee Week or for that matter a Trust?

Gather round as in line with another winter tradition, storytelling, I will share with you what a trust is, what trustees do and what this has to do with the Romans and the Crusaders!

If you are sitting comfortably, I’ll begin…

Lots of civilisations have had ways of dealing with what happens to people’s property and money after they die. Many civilisations have also had some very restrictive rules on who can have or use any of that wealth and how it’s distributed.

The Romans, people not known for allowing something like death to interfere with what they wanted to happen, had well-developed inheritance rules and got around this by setting up an arrangement where upon death a  named trusted individual would distribute and use their money in a way that they had prearranged. This was called “fideicommissum”. Crucially it allowed for revenue or estate to be given to someone to hold and either use behalf on behalf of someone who could not receive the money, i.e. was a woman, slave, illegitimate child or someone who had not yet been born for example the firstborn son of your son. Interestingly the word “fideicommissum” is made up of two parts, the first meaning faith, not religious faith, but having faith in something, being able to believe in it, so very like trust. The second part “committere” (to commit).

So we see the very beginning essential elements including trusting that somebody will be committed to doing something on your behalf are established. Leaving the person trusted to be responsible for ensuring that a third party benefited. Modern trustees are even now enjoined under the law to act in the best interest of the beneficiaries of the charity. The main difference for the next thousand years or so is in order for this to happen somebody has to die, it was not until mediaeval England that this began to change and here is where the Crusaders come into the story.*

Crusaders were often gone from the country for many years leaving their lands, wives children, and servants behind them. Somebody had to actually deal with things they were gone and chiefly thanks to the Normans, this could not be the wives. Married women were not allowed to own property, in fact when they married any property they did own became their husband’s (little side note that lovely piece of law did not disappear properly until 1929).  There is a raft of other things this affected, but that’s an entirely different storytime. What Crusaders did was they organised a trusted man or men to deal with their estate in their absence, pay their bills, invest their profits and look after their beneficiaries. At last, something looking like trusts as we know them started to emerge. But it is mediaeval England and whenever money and land are involved various unpleasant shenanigans occur, which meant that regular people turned up in front of the king to have these things sorted out. In fact, it became so regular that the king ended up letting the chancellery deal with it directly. At this point it starts to become codified, bounded by rules and tradition, and a bit more clearly resembling the trust we know now.

Once again it’s worth remembering the word “trust”, the idea was that people were trusted to ensure that living beneficiaries and not themselves benefited (which is where a great deal of the argy-bargy came from and subsequently the laws) and it is still at the root of what trusteeship is today. Alongside this, the mediaeval church was busy working out ways that money could be left to them, used by them or in terms of land, held for them. The church (which was at this point in Roman Catholic, and in terms of trusts was mainly Franciscan) was considered by definition to be working on behalf of the populace and providing succour (help) for the poor. In this way, the concept of charitable uses begins to develop over the next couple of hundred years

In fact, by 1601 we get the Charitable Uses Act. In this case “uses" being synonymous with Trusts in meaning. It sets out what things the government believed would generally be of benefit to society and that it wanted to encourage people to donate towards. Some of those things are still at the core of charities today, although we refer to them somewhat differently, whilst some of them are not.  For example “Marriages of poor maids is no longer” an object of charity, whereas the “Maintenance of sick and maimed soldiers and mariners” probably is albeit in more modern language. All these charities and the ones that come after them have required trustees. The people who we have faith in committing to manage a charity within its objects and for the good of it beneficiaries.

Trustees these days can be almost anyone, to be a trustee you need to be:

• over 16 years of age or 18 for some types of charity
• able to give some time to support and management of the trust to ensure that the beneficiaries that the best from it
• properly appointed - this means depending on its constitution voted on to the trustee board
• not be on the shortlist of people who are not allowed to become a trustee or what in trustee speak is called a “fit and proper person”.

Trusteeship takes time, you do not have to know everything, but it helps if you’re willing to learn as there’s lots of free help, training and support. Crucially you don’t have to be male, a citizen of Rome,  a Franciscan Friar, part of the nobility or best friends with someone who has a suit of armour, a horse and a questionable need to go abroad for 10 years. Many local charities would love some new trustees, why not contact us and find out who they are, what they do and if they are the right fit for you.

*Small disclaimer, I am not an expert on mediaeval law or world legal history; however, I think it’s a little bit unlikely that the whole of the rest of the world fails to have any mechanism to do anything like this. The Trust’s s that we have in the UK are based on English legal history. However, this does not mean that the cultures and other times did not have equally interesting mechanisms to do very similar things. It is also worth noting that those clever historians are always digging up new examples of things that we had forgotten had existed!