What is the Whig view of history, and why do I need to know about it to understand the Pure Trust Theory?
What is this doing in a discussion of trusts? I don't know, but our friends, the pure-trust people, brought it up first...although they do not label it as such. The Whig interpretation of history has its roots in this country in Thomas Jefferson's pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America of 1774. It is based on the notion that that Saxon England was some pure state of freedom corrputed by the Norman's importation of feudalism to England. Historians today know far more about Saxon England than did Jefferson. Today we know that Saxon England was not some libertarian paradise of individual right and freedom to contract.

Our friends, the Pure Trust Theorists, add a new twist to this. Since they are in literal awe of the common law, they cannot claim that the Anglo-Normans (who invented common law) were the bad guys. They believe the real free people were the ones after the Norman Conquest. The result is still pop history...the search for the perfect past that never happened.

The idea that there was a group of people in the Middle Ages who lived under a system of government based on natural rights is ludicrous, folks. Nobody like John Locke was not around in Norman or Saxon England. I am sorry to have to break this news to you.

This is just an aside, but some pure-trust empresarios like to claim that the trust derived from medieval times (or even Roman times). This is odd, because most serious legal scholars look to the Statute of Uses of 1570 to be the bedrock of trust law. Remember, in England, a duty of the trustee to hold legal title to property only for the benefit of another can be enforced only because a statute says so. These pure trust folks need to bone up on their history.

One Pure-Trust smart-ass told me in an email (when I asked him whether the Statute of Uses is universal and general common law) that it was beneath his function in life to act as a paralegal (of all things) to find the answer to these types of questions. Don't look for the deep thinkers of the pure-trust community to find an answer to this any time soon.

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