Executory interests under the Statute of Uses

This chapter shows how lawyers grappled with the effect of the Statutes of Uses and Wills on future interests in land, and the possibilities which they seemed to introduce for creating new kinds of estates in land. The legislation seemingly transformed land law by giving legal effect to a party’s wishes, in the first case by ‘executing the use’ and in the second by giving force to a testator’s ‘free will and pleasure’. Conveyancers thought for a time that this gave them the means of creating perpetual settlements of a family’s land. A number of leading cases reported by Coke show how perpetuity clauses were eventually outlawed by the judges, and how executory interests were to a limited extent subjected to principles of law. The chapter ends with Lord Nottingham’s formulation of a doctrine of perpetuities in 1682.