The first treatise on charity law appears to have been a reading (series of lectures) on the 1601 statute of charitable uses given by prominent lawyer and parliamentarian Sir Francis Moore in 1607.
Incredibly, his manuscript survives in Cambridge University Library. It is all in Law French, a peculiar form of mediaeval French then still used by the English legal profession, and has never been published or translated (except several limited passages by one modern legal historian).
Half a century later in 1660 there appeared what was probably the first charity law textbook, The Law of Charitable Uses by John Herne, published in London by the legal publisher Twyford. It contained around a hundred case reports in English, mostly copied from other law books, plus legislation and various other documents as examples of procedure. A second slightly larger edition came out in 1663, same author and publisher.
In 1676 the publisher Twyford again brought out a slightly larger third edition, this time under a new author, George Duke. In it an appendix was added, a document in English entitled “Collections out of the Learned Readings of Sir Francis Moore”. The title page of Duke’s edition claimed this was from Moore’s own manuscript. Moore had died in 1621, so the inference is that before he died he made his own English abridgment or summary of his own reading in 1607 in a separate new manuscript, now lost.
If Moore did this (and it’s not clear why he would), then other hands added to it. According to a modern author, the summary is indeed a reasonably close recapitulation of the main points in Moore’s reading, even in the same order. But someone must have updated the original text with references to cases and statutes that occurred or were published years after Moore gave his reading in 1607, even years after he died in 1621. As well, this updater could not bring himself to pretend to be Moore himself: he framed many passages as talking about Moore in the third person, “he”, “the reader” said or observed such and so; while leaving many other passages framed in the first person, as if by Moore himself.
Here then is the text of this summary of Moore’s reading as contained in Duke’s book: 16760105DukeSummary Moore1607reading
Warning: This is difficult text for modern readers. Not only is it written in post-Elizabethan or early modern English with many peculiar spellings and manners of expression; but it is filled to the brim with legal language that no longer exists. I have added 178 annotations to try and help, mostly in the first part. The summary is divided into seven parts (“divisions”), of which the first and largest deals with “charitable uses”. This is what will most likely be of interest to modern charity law afficionados, as it sheds considerable light on how a legal thinker wrestled with what is or isn’t charitable way back near the beginnings of modern charity law.