The Charitable Trust Deeds Project

Charlotte Smith, Modern Legal Records Specialist, November 2024

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Transcript

I am going to introduce to you the project that we have been doing to catalogue the charitable trust deeds, which are held here at The National Archives in the Chancery Close Rolls in series C 54. Then I am going to think about some of the ways in which the records, and the catalogue data that we have created, can be used for research, before concluding by some thinking a little bit about possible next steps for the project.

So, as we begin, let us think about what these charitable trust deeds are, and what the project is. The charitable trust deeds project is a project by the Legal Records Team to catalogue the circa 71, 500 charitable trust deeds, which you can find enrolled in the Chancery Close Rolls in C 54.

For this project we are effectively converting information contained in Victorian indexes, and in later card indexes, into item descriptions in the online catalogue – making these records searchable by firstly date of enrolment; then place (which means county and parish); charitable purpose (for example a trust for Wesleyan Methodists, or a trust to promote the moral welfare of fallen women); and then, finally, object (for example to build a church to build a Chapel, a school, a penitentiary).

It has taken the combined efforts of a small army of people over a number of years. So we have had many people doing name and place checks. We have then undertaken circa 150 physical document checks, to check things like duplicate entries in the indexes, missing names, missing objects. And then we have had our data wizards converting hard copy data into spreadsheets, and then getting the information in those spreadsheets into the catalogue.

As matters stand at the moment we have 39,000, just over 39,000 Items – that is charitable trust deeds – in the catalogue, with another 32,500 to come in the next few months.

So, what are these charitable trust deeds? well a trust deed is the document which records the situation when legal ownership of some form of property or asset is given to a person, or persons, called the trustees, on the condition that it should be used for the benefit of another person – the beneficiary; or, in the case of charities, for a charitable purpose.

Now, there has always been a desire to record such arrangements, and that is why these records are enrolled in the Close Rolls. Firstly, this helps to avoid fraud. It makes sure trustees use the trust property appropriately. It makes sure they obey the conditions upon which property was transferred to them and enables the beneficiaries and others to see what the trust was created to do.

This is important because trusts, and particularly charitable trusts, tie property up for long periods of time. Also, where you’ve got a purpose trust, like a charity, there is not necessarily a direct beneficiary to enforce the trust, and therefore there needs to be extra oversight – for example by the courts or by government.

This particular collection of charitable trust deeds, that we see in the Close Rolls in C 54, came about after the Mortmain and charitable Uses Act of 1736 made it compulsory for conveyances of property for charitable for purposes to be done by deed – that is in writing, witnessed by two people – and then enrolled within six months. That is why these records are here.

What do they look like? Well deeds as enrolled are recorded on pieces of parchment – or membranes – which are then, like other Chancery documents, sewn end to end and then rolled, rather like a loo roll, for storage. The records that we have in C 54 cover the period from 1736 to 1903, although that will include some deeds dating from an earlier period.

To understand the significance of the project to catalogue the charitable trust deeds, you have to first understand what it has been like, until now, trying to identify and locate individual deeds.

So, the most important thing to know is that, until this cataloguing project was undertaken, the only way you could identify individual deeds was by coming on site and using hard copy finding aids in the Maps and Large Documents Reading Room here at Kew.

So, for the period 1736 to 1870, what you would be using would be bound volumes arranged alphabetically by place with a separate volume for London. These volumes are a Victorian cut and paste job. What they are is the contents of a Deputy keeper’s Report cut up, arranged alphabetically, and pasted into these volumes. What they give you is the place, the trust purpose, the regnal year or year, part of the roll, and then the number of the deed on the roll.

Now though, once this project is complete, all of those descriptions will be fully searchable on Discovery.

So, for the later period, from 1870 to 1903, what you would be using is the card catalogue in the Map Room, which is arranged alphabetically by place, and gives you the place, the trust purpose, the year of enrolment, the roll or part number and a full C 54 reference. But you only have access to any of this if you’re on site – whereas, once this cataloguing project is completed, you will be able to search for different trust deeds from the comfort of your own home, using the online catalogue.

So that’s exciting. It enables more people than ever before to engage with these charitable trust deeds. But I think what’s most exciting is the research potential which is unlocked by this cataloguing project.

Now, it is easy to dismiss the importance of enrolled charitable trust deeds. They are to all intents and purposes apparently boring, technical, verbose records – drafted by lawyers who give every appearance of having been paid by the word. There is lots of extraneous information in there, that you do not necessarily want. You will find yourself wanting to scream, “oh, will you just get to the point!” You may find it difficult to pick out, from amongst all the verbiage, the information that you require. Then, we know that these documents are in what is quite a physically inconvenient form. They are enrolled. There is a lot of rolling and re-rolling to be done and, speaking from experience, it is almost invariably the case that the records that you want will be at the far end of the roll.

So, they can be a bit tedious to use. But they are so worth it they are a veritable gold mine of information. For example, they tell you huge amounts about the history of charitable institutions, their benefactors, and their beneficiaries – if that is what you are interested in. They allow you to see the purposes for which property was placed into trust, and the conditions upon which it was given – which has both historic interest, but also potential use for current legal purposes.

They can tell you a lot about the lives and circumstances of those establishing trusts and acting as trustees. So, for example, on the slide here I have an excerpt from a trust deed made by Welsh Calvinistic Methodists in 1828 – 29, and in that trust deed the organisation has recorded the name, the address, the occupation, and information allowing you to tell whether the person is literate or not, for all the male members of their congregations at that point. It is a gold mine of social history and local history information.

So, looking at individual trust deeds, you can see a lot about the lives of the people touched by those trust deeds – by the institutions whose history they set out. You can also see what sorts of property are being put into trust, and the precise objects for which property is being used, and the way that might reflect the circumstances of the people establishing the trust. You can also see, if you’re a geeky lawyer like me, how perhaps drafting practises change, or the content of deeds changes, in response to legal experience or particular problems encountered. So we have got examples of the model deed of skircoat, which Methodists adopted as a way of avoiding the problems they encountered around the legal technicality of deeds, and problems they had conforming or complying with those.

So, they are individually interesting documents. But I do think probably, for many people, the most exciting thing about the charitable trust deeds project is that it unlocks a huge amount of metadata, which enables new research uses – and can perhaps shift the focus away from individual deeds to using these records to paint bigger pictures, or to give us a broader understanding. So, for example, using the metadata we can take from the catalogue we can trace shifting patterns in the purposes of trusts for charities are we used it over time – reflecting perhaps shifting social conditions and concerns.

We can think about how legal frameworks or initiatives impact upon charitable giving over time – for example, we might see evidence in these trust deeds of a shift away from the use of trusts to found reformatories or penitentiaries as the state assumes responsibility for building and paying for prisons.

We can also, using this metadata, begin to think about how the objects for which property were given was given have changed over time – and perhaps how this reflects the changing needs or preoccupations of the charitable organisations concerned. So, for example, we might see religious bodies shifting away from church building and towards building schools or libraries, or funding overseas mission.

We can also use various data visualisation tools – a bit like I’ve done here – not least to map geographical distribution of particular types of charitable trust activity, and to be able to trace the frequency of different types of charitable trust dealings.

So I think there is magic in the metadata. I have given you two examples in this presentation. This first one is again looking at Welsh Calvinistic Methodists – a group of which I am incredibly fond. We can see that in the 1820s we only have two charitable trust deeds relating to Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, and the numbers are pretty low through the 1830s the 1840s 1850s. We can then see that, as represented in the catalogue data at present, the vast majority of charitable trust deeds relating to Welsh Calvinistic Methodists were created in the 1860s – and in fact there are no charitable trust deeds for a later date.

As we move to the end of this presentation, I have pulled up a visualisation here of the distribution of trust events – that is trust deeds – using the language of “fallen women”, and looking at how that shifts over time. So, we see in the 1800s there is only one, and then there is a relatively small number until we get to the 1850s and the 1860s, where we see a spike in the use of this language. Now, that might reflect changes in the use of language. It might equally reflect how the fashions in charitable giving, or the creation of trusts, have changed over time. So, for example, we are not so worried about establishing charities for fallen women, before we have a sudden rush of concern in the 1850s and 60s. Or, alternatively, it might just be that we are conceptualising and naming this group of beneficiaries in a different way. But you see how we can begin to think about this, as we unpick and reflect upon the metadata to which we now have access.

So what about next steps? Well, I think you’ll see there are lots of exciting things that we can do with charitable trust deeds. The deeds enrolled in the Close Rolls are not our only collection of charitable trust deeds here at The National Archives. We have at least three other collections of charitable trust deeds. We have those in J 18 – which are the enrolment books of the High Court of Judiciary. So, in terms of next steps there are challenges to working with J 18. The existing indexes do not seem to have a very clear idea of what is charitable, versus what is not, and that requires some thought.

CHAR 13 is a large series, so a logical next step might be, for example, to catalogue CHAR 12, which runs from 1856 to 1925 and consists of thirteen bound volumes of trust deeds. But that is a discussion for another day.

Thank you very much for your time, and I hope that I’ve enthused you as to the great value and interest of trust deeds.