The governance of charitable trusts in the nineteenth century: The West Riding of Yorkshire

Charitable donations were essential to social welfare provision in England and Wales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article uses a principal-agent framework to examine the governance problems faced by endowed charities - problems that were uniquely acute because, on one side, the principal (the charity's benefactor) was usually long since dead and, on the other, the main intended beneficiaries (the poor) were inarticulate and politically impotent. The reports of the Charity Commissioners on a sample of endowed charities operating in Yorkshire are used to exemplify the type of governance problems encountered. Such difficulties involved the charities' structure, their resource base and their management. It is shown that the benefactors' intentions were most readily frustrated, and the intended beneficiaries most readily denied their welfare provision, when the politically and socially powerful condoned the alteration of the trusts' functions. This was most obvious in the second half of the nineteenth century for the provision of 'doles' to the poor and for the provision of free grammar schools.