The Medieval Origins of the Revocable Trust
In the 1990s, if you went to a Renaissance Festival, a bearded dude with a gleam in his eye and a figure that rivals King Henry VIII would tell you about the medieval origins of many expressions and practices familiar from our everyday lives, and most of them are not true. Everyone with a basic command of the Google search can figure out that the F word was not originally an acronym, for example. The Middle Ages were more interesting than most people give them credit for being, though, and not just because of the cool looking, but impractical by Florida standards, clothes people wore and the allegedly copious quantities of alcohol they drank because ale was plentiful. For example, trust law has its origins in medieval England. If you have a revocable trust, you can thank the wealthy but belligerent Plantagenets and their vast network of feuding cousins. If you don’t have a revocable trust but would like to establish one, contact a Dade City estate planning lawyer.
“But I’m Not Dead!” the Knight Protested
Trusts were not something new in medieval England. They existed as an estate planning strategy even in ancient Rome. The ancient Romans had a practice called fideicommissum, where a person could entrust his or her property to a trustee, known as the fidelis, upon the original owner’s death, and the fidelis would distribute the property to the grantor’s heirs. It was similar to today’s testamentary trusts or irrevocable trusts.
By the end of the 12th century, property owners in England had a rude awakening regarding how times had changed in ways that the old trust laws had failed to accommodate. When landowners left England to fight in the Crusades in the Middle East, they did not know whether they would return alive. Some of them transferred their property to trustees before they left. When the Crusaders returned, some of the trustees refused to return the property entrusted to them to the original owners. This led to court disputes, and the courts often sided with the trustees, arguing that the grantors had legally transferred ownership of their property to the trustees and no longer had a claim to it.
It took a few centuries of legal machinations, but now we have trust law as we know it. Unlike the medieval knights who placed their property in trust before fighting in the Crusades, you can have your cake and eat it too if you establish a revocable trust. This means that the trust owns your property, but you still control it. You can modify the trust instrument whenever you choose, changing your instructions about how the trustee should use the property and even taking property back from the trust if you decide to do this.
Contact a Florida Estate Planning Attorney About Revocable Trusts
An estate planning attorney can help you establish a trust that fits you better than a suit of armor ever would. Contact The Law Office of Laurie R. Chane in Dade City, Florida to discuss your case.
Source:
penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Fideicommissum.html
