Passive trust, a trust as to which the trustee has no active duty to perform. Passive uses were resorted to before the Statute of Uses, in order to escape from the trammels and hardships of the Common Law, the permanent division of property into legal and equitable interests being clearly an invention to lessen the force of some pre-existing law. For similar reasons equitable interests were after the statute revived under the form of trusts. as such, they continued to flourish, notwithstanding the singular amelioration effected at a later period in the law of tenure, because the legal ownership was attended with some peculiar inconveniences. For, in order to guard against the forfeiture of a legal estate for life passive trusts, by settlements, were resorted to, and hence, trusts to preserve contingent remainders; and passive trusts were created in order to prevent dower.
Where an active trust was created, without defining the quantity of the estate to be taken by the trustee, the courts endeavoured in the case of devises by will land executory contracts to give by construction the quantity originally requisite to satisfy the trust in every event, although the general rule is that the same words of limitation are (or were before 1926) necessary to convey either a legal or equitable estate in fee simple in a grant by deed to trustees as are required in any other grant of the legal estate in fee: see Moncton's Settlement, (1913) 2 Ch 636; and also Bostock's Settlement, (1921) 2 Ch 693. But if a larger estate was expressly given, the Courts could not reject the excess; and although the estate taken, whether expressly or con-structively, might not have exceeded the original scope of the trust, yet, if eventually no estate, or a less estate, were actually wanted, the legal ownership remained wholly or partially vested in the trustee as a merely passive trustee, 1 Hayes' Conv. By the Law of Property Act, 1925, 1st Sch., par. 3, the legal estate existing on the 1st January, 1926, in a bare trustee became vested in the person of full age who at that date was entitled to require the legal estate to be vested in him subject to any mortgage term subsisting or created by the Act upon the conditions and subject to the provisions of the Schedule, and to the provisions of the (English) Law of Property (Amendment) Act, 1926, in favour of a purchaser without notice from the trustee. See BARE TRUSTEE.