The purpose of this website is to help users dig into the pre-modern roots of modern charity law and the tax law intertwined with it.
Modern charity law is dominated by several centuries of difficult and sometimes inconsistent court decisions along with voluminous and sometimes incomprehensible tax and other statutes.
Part of the problem is “Humpty-Dumpty-ism”. Judges and lawyers in the courts, and politicians and legislative drafters working in and for parliaments, tend to presume that their own instinctive concept of what is and isn’t charitable is shared by everybody else in society and is therefore obvious and doesn’t need explaining. So they write their conclusions and enactments down without telling posterity about the underlying social and legal background that actually influenced, or even dictated, what they decided—which leaves later analysts scratching their heads, “Now where did that come from?”
Even the renowned Lord Macnaghten, in the leading Pemsel case, appears to invent the “four heads of charity”. He does not cite the original thinker, a lawyer arguing a case eighty years before; or that this lawyer’s idea of four basic categories of charitable purposes ended up in a widely used charity law textbook that Lord Macnaghten must have absorbed early in his career.
A decade and a half of ferreting about in libraries, archives and websites has allowed me to collect many documents that illustrate what notions of charity prevailed in the past. This website can only be a sampling, of course. One has only one lifetime. Several research tools are included that will allow readers to take their own deep dive into this fascinating subject.