The CROWN as CORPORATION
Frederic Maitland
Law Quarterly Review 17 (1901)

The greatest of artificial persons, politically speaking, is the State. But it depends on the legal
institutions and forms of every commonwealth whether and how far the State or its titular head is
officially treated as an artificial person. In England we now say that the Crown is a corporation: it was certainly not so when the king's peace died with him, and "every man that could forthwith robbed another."

I quote these words from Sir F. Pollock's First Book of Jurisprudence. They may serve to attract a little interest to that curious freak of English law, the corporation sole. In a previous paper I have written something concerning its history. I endeavoured to show that this strange conceit originated in the sixteenth century and within the domain of what we may call "church property law". It held out a hope, which proved to be vain, that it would provide a permanent "subject" in which could be reposed that fee simple of the parochial glebe which had been slowly abstracted from the patron and was not comfortable in those clouds to which Littleton had banished it. Then, following in the steps of Sir William Markby, I ventured to say that this corporation sole has shown itself to be no "juristic person", but is either a natural man or a juristic abortion. If the corporation sole had never trespassed beyond the ecclesiastical province in which it was native, it would nowadays be very unimportant.

Clearly it would have no future before it, and the honour of writing its epitaph would hardly be worth the trouble. Unfortunately, however, the thought occurred to Coke -- or perhaps in the first instance to some other lawyer of Coke's day -- that the King of England ought to be brought into one class with the parson: both were to be artificial persons and both were to be corporations sole.

Whether the State should be personified, or whether the State, being really and naturally a person, can be personified, these may be very interesting questions. What we see in England, at least what we see if we look only at the surface, is, not that the State is personified or that the State's personality is openly acknowledged, but (I must borrow from one of Mr Gilbert's operas) that the king is "parsonified". Since that feat was performed, we have been, more or less explicitly, trying to persuade ourselves that our law does not recognize the personality or corporate character of the State or Nation or Commonwealth, and has no need to do anything of the sort if only it will admit that the king, or, yet worse, the Crown, is not unlike a parson.

It would be long to tell the whole story of this co-ordination of king and parson, for it would take
us deep into the legal and political thoughts of the Middle Ages. Only two or three remarks can here be hazarded. The medieval king was every inch a king, but just for this reason he was every inch a man and you did not talk nonsense about him. You did not ascribe to him immortality or ubiquity or such powers as no mortal can wield. If you said that he was Christ's Vicar, you meant what you said, and you might add that he would become the servant of the devil if he declined towards tyranny. And there was little cause for ascribing to him more than one capacity. Now and
then it was necessary to distinguish between lands that he held in right of his crown and lands which
had come to him in right of an escheated barony or vacant bishopric. But in the main all his lands were his lands, and we must be careful not to read a trusteeship for the nation into our medieval
documents. The oft-repeated demand that the king should "live of his own" implied this view of the
situation. I do not mean that this was at any time a complete view. We may, for example, find the lawyers of Edward II's day catching up a notion that the canonists had propagated, declaring that the king's crown is always under age, and so coordinating the corona with the ecclesia. But English lawyers were not good at work of this kind; they liked their persons to be real, and what we have seen of the parochial glebe has shown us that even the church (ecclesia particularis) was not for them a person. As to the king, in all the Year Books I have seen very little said of him that was not meant to be strictly and literally true of a man, of an Edward or a Henry.

Then, on the other hand, medieval thought conceived the nation as a community and pictured it as a body of which the king was the head. It resembled those smaller bodies which it comprised and of which it was in some sort composed. What we should regard as the contrast between State and Corporation was hardly visible. The "commune of the realm" differed rather in size and power than in essence from the commune of a county or the commune of a borough. And as the comitatus or county took visible form in the comitatus or county court, so the realm took visible form in a parliament. "Every one", said Thorpe C.J. in 1365, "is bound to know at once what is done in
Parliament, for Parliament represents the body of the whole realm."

For a time it seems very possible, as we read the Year Books, that so soon as lawyers begin to argue about the nature of corporations or bodies politic and clearly to sever the Borough, for example, from the sum of burgesses, they will definitely grasp and formulate the very sound thought that the realm is "a corporation aggregate of many". In 1522 Fineux C.J. after telling how some corporations are made by the king, others by the pope, others by both king and pope, adds that there are corporations by the common law, for, says he, "the parliament of the king and the lors and the commons are a corporation." What is still lacking is the admission that the corporate
realm, besides being the wielder of public power, may also be the "subject" of private rights, the owner of lands and chattels. And this is the step that we have never yet formally taken.

The portrait that Henry VIII painted of the body politic of which he was the sovereign head will not
be forgotten:

Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme Head and King, having the dignity and royal estate of the Imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a Body Politick, compact of all sorts and degrees of people
and by names of Spirituality and Temporality been bounden, and owen to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience...
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