David Smith and I first met in the fall of 1967. At the time we were graduate students. We shared an interest in the institutional history of the church and were attempting to write Ph.D. dissertations on some aspect of that subject. Although our research would eventually take us into many corners of England and require us to work in many different archives, at the time we were both in London, and we chanced to enroll in a seminar on medieval bishops’ registers being given at the Institute of Historical Research by the late Professor Rosalind Hill. As I recall, we were the only students taking part, and we became friends.

This was a happy event for me, both professionally and personally. In the years that followed, I became something of a specialist in the history of the ecclesiastical courts in England, and David became (among other things) the Director of the Institute which contains the best collection of surviving records from those courts. It became my practice and my aspiration to spend at least one week each year working in the Borthwick Institute. I may have missed a summer, or perhaps two, but I have been a regular user of the Borthwick, and David has been there to greet me and to help me. The occasion of his formal retirement and his sixtieth birthday provides a fitting moment to recall some of the things that have brought us together over the years and also to attempt to fill one small gap in the history of English law: the law of charity and the ecclesiastical forum.

Introduction

It was once assumed that the English law of charity had its origins in the enactment of the Tudor statutes of charitable uses. Prior to this legislation, charity had existed, but it stood largely outside the realm of regulation by law. Giving to charity was a spiritual and private matter. Charitable gifts were undoubtedly made, but their definition was uncertain, their regulation sporadic, and their enforcement ineffective. Moreover, the principal purpose of charitable giving was thought to be saving the soul of the donor, rather than benefitting the world's unfortunates. Personal piety was manifest in the gift, and that manifestation was itself the object. Thus ‘indiscriminate charity’, often enough coupled with crude attempts to repress vagabondage and idleness, became the order of the day. The law did not much matter.