Medieval Invention
Many reasons have been given for the invention of the cestui que use as a legal device. During the Crusades, and other wars on the Continent, landowners might be gone for long periods of time. Others might be absent because of business adventures or religious pilgrimages. There was no assurance they would ever return home. The cestui que use allowed them to leave a trusted friend or relative with the sort of powers, discretions and they hoped, the duties. Today, this power would be called the "power of attorney". Religious orders such as Franciscans, Cistercians, Benedictines and other mendicant orders took vows of poverty, yet retained the use of donated property. Cestui que use allowed them the benefits of land without legal ownership.
Besides the obvious limitations placed on cestui que by the Statute of Mortmain, Statute of Uses and the Statute of Wills, its legality was shaped indirectly by provisions within the Magna Carta and Quia Emptores.
Read more about this topic: Cestui Que
Famous quotes containing the words medieval and/or invention:
“Our medieval historians who prefer to rely as much as possible on official documents because the chronicles are unreliable, fall thereby into an occasionally dangerous error. The documents tell us little about the difference in tone which separates us from those times; they let us forget the fervent pathos of medieval life.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)