. and Rich. II.) enacted
that this licence should be issued out of chancery after
investigation; and the principle was applied to civil corporations.
The necessity of this licence was one lay check on injurious
alienation. (4) _Irresponsible Administration._--Until after the 13th
century, when the lay courts had asserted their right to settle
disputes as to lands held in alms, the administration of charity was
from the lay point of view entirely irresponsible. It was outside the
secular jurisdiction; and civilly the professed clergy, who were the
administrators, were "dead." They could not sue or be sued except
through their sovereign--their chief, the abbot. They formed a large
body of non-civic inhabitants free from the pressure and the
responsibilities of civil life. (5) _Control_.--Apart from the control
of the abbot, prior, master or other head, the bishop was visitor, or,
as we should say, inspector; and abuses might be remedied by the visit
of the bishop or his ordinary. The bishop's ordinary (2 Henry V. i. 1)
was the recognized visitor of all hospitals apart from the founder.
The founder and his family retained a right of intervention. Sometimes
thus an institution was reorganized, or even dissolved, the property
reverting to the founder (Dugdale, _Monasticon Anglicanum_, vi. 2.
715). (6) _Cy-pres._--Charities were, especially after Henry V.'s
reign, appropriated to other uses, either because their original
purpose failed or because some new object had become important. Thus,
for instance, a college or hospital for lepers (1363) is
re-established by the founder's family with a master and priest, _quod
nulli leprosi reperiebantur_; and a similar hospital founded in Henry
I.'s time near Oxford has decayed, and is given by Edward III. to
Oriel College, Oxford, to maintain a chaplain and poor brethren. Thus,
apart from alienation pure and simple, the principle of adaptation to
new uses was put in force at an early date, and supplied many
precedents to Wolsey, Edward VI. and the post-Reformation bishops. The
system of endowments was indeed far more adaptable than it would at
first sight seem to have been. (7) _The Sources of Income._--The
hospitals were chiefly supported by rents or the produce of land; or,
if attached to monasteries, out of the tithe of their monastic lands
or other sources of revenue, or out of the appropriated tithes of the
sec