Mortmain
Historically, the land owner usually would be the religious office of a church; today, insofar as mortmain prohibitions against perpetual ownership still exist, it refers most often to modern companies and charitable trusts.During the Middle Ages in Western European countries such as England, the Roman Catholic Church acquired a substantial amount of real estate.In a person's making of their own trusts, provisions and settlements, to newly proposed founded bodies or groups of persons, there are commonly still laws against perpetuities, preventing their "dead hand" from prevailing more than, for example, 80 years away and there is the common law rule in Saunders v Vautier enabling all of the adult beneficiaries to draw special legal agreements together to override any historic provisions.[8] At the time of her trust-making the statutes against mortmain were in force (pre-dating the Law of Property Amendment Act 1860 piloted by Lord Cozens-Hardy) and having not met the narrow, high-authority formalities for such a trust to be valid it was void, rather than imbuing it with special privileges in relation to taxation and viability.that these purchases being usually made by ecclesiastical bodies, the members of which (being professed) were reckoned dead persons in law, land therefore, holden by them, might with great propriety be said to be held in mortua manu.