ABSTRACT
The first example of Parliament recognising what was, at the time, a charity, was set out in the Preamble to the Statute of Charitable Uses 1601 (sometimes colloquially known as the ‘Statute of Elizabeth’). This Preamble contained a list of what was, in Elizabethan times, seen to be charitable although, as Lord Macnaghten pointed out in The Commissioners for Special Purposes of the Income Tax v Pemsel,1 the courts had recognised that charities could exist long before the 1601 Act. The courts used the Preamble to recognise those organisations or gifts as having charitable status if they fell within the list contained in it or fell within the ‘spirit and intendment’ of that list.
