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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
The courts were frequently asked to consider the fate of legacies to ‘poor relations.’ But not until Mahon v. Savage (1803), 1 Sch. and Lef. III and Att.-Gen. v. Price (1810), 17 Ves. 371, did any question turn on whether the legacies were or were not charitable.
In the majority of cases the testator had bequeathed personalty to his poor relations, to be distributed among them at the discretion of his executors. The primary question which confronted the courts was to determine which of the testator's poor relations could take.
The eighteenth-century law on this topic is an intractable bog of conflicting decisions, made more intractable by confused and incompetent reporting: see, for example, Isaac v. De Friez (1754), Ambl. 595 and Att.-Gen. v. Bucknall (1741), 2 Atk. 328. The balance of authority suggests that the Statute of Distribution, 1670 (22 and 23 Car. II c. 10), was deemed to be ‘the best measure for setting bounds to such general words; otherwise it would be endless to find out everybody that were relations’.
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