The Authority of Parliament and the Scope of the Statute of Uses 1536

Drawing upon evidence from early-sixteenth-century Chancery pleadings, this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the framing of the Statute of Uses 1536. It looks, not backwards from later unexecuted uses or trusts, but forwards from evidence of practice in creating uses in the decades immediately before 1536, so as to assess the intentions of those responsible for the statute and the extent to which it was foreseen that the statute would not execute some types of uses, and that such types of uses would in practice continue to be created, suggesting that, aside from its effect upon feoffments to the uses of a last will, the intended consequences of the statute were less far-reaching than may have been supposed