The trust is an invention of English equity. On both sides of the Atlantic, an equitable duty is a duty enforceable in a court of chancery or in a court having the powers of a court of chancery. See Rest. (Second) of Trusts §2 cmt. e. In England, from medieval times until 1875, equity matters had been the exclusive jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery. During the reign of Edward III (r.1327-1377), the Court’s home was fixed at Westminster Hall, London. Until 1813 there had been only two judges in the Court of Chancery, the Lord High Chancellor and the Master of the Rolls. In 1813 the office of Vice-Chancellor of England was created. In 1841 two more Vice-Chancellor positions were added, and in 1851 two Lord-Justice-of-Appeal-in-Chancery positions. All in all, England’s only Court of Chancery had just seven judges serving on its bench in Westminster Hall when the Court was “dismantled” by Parliament in 1875.

Equity jurisprudence, however, has lived on and flourished in England’s courts of law, the fusion of law and equity being for the most part jurisdictional only. The jurisdictional fusion was inevitable. “The enormous industrial, international and imperial expansion of Britain…[in the 19th century]… necessitated developments in equity to deal with a host of new problems. The accumulation of business fortunes required rules for the administration of companies and partnerships; and the change in emphasis from landed wealth to stocks and shares necessitated the development of new concepts of property settlements.” See Hanbury & Maudsley, Modern Equity 13 (10th ed. 1976). Suffice to say, the seven-judge separate Court of Chancery became ill-equipped administratively to handle the explosion in equity litigation that had been touched off by the Industrial Revolution. During his tenures as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, John Singleton Copley [Baron Lyndhurst] juggled a load of equity cases, many of them trust matters, that was growing heavier by the day. Moreover, adjudicating equity cases was not the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain’s only governmental function.

The younger John Singleton Copley was born in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, in 1772, likely on Beacon Hill in a house that was on or near the current site of 41-42 Beacon Street. His father, John Singleton Copley [senior], was then practicing portrait painting in Boston. See, e.g., A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) (1765), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Portrait of Paul Revere (1768), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. When young Copley was two the family relocated to England. In 1794 young Copley was awarded a B.A. degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1797 an M.A. degree. He then entered himself as a member of Lincoln’s Inn, where he became a pupil of “Mr. Tidd.” In 1804, he was called to the bar (Midland Circuit).

In January of 1824, the younger Copley was appointed Attorney General (England), and on September 14, 1826, Master of the Rolls. The latter office he held only eight months. On George Canning becoming Prime Minister, the Great Seal was delivered to Copley (April 30, 1827), as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, he having been raised to the peerage as Baron Lyndhurst a few days before. He resigned the chancellorship upon the accession of the Whigs to power in November of 1830. He was to serve as Lord High Chancellor two more times, the third time being from 1841-1846.

As to the administration of equity jurisprudence on this side of the Atlantic, see Chapter 1 of Loring and Rounds: A Trustee’s Handbook (2023), the relevant portions of which chapter are set forth in the appendix immediately below. The Handbook is available for purchase at Loring and Rounds: A Trustee's Handbook, 2023 Edition | Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory.