r_. The
founder of all corporations in the strictest and original sense is the
king alone, for he only can incorporate a society: and in civil
incorporations, such as mayor and commonalty, &c, where there are no
possessions or endowments given to the body, there is no other founder
but the king: but in eleemosynary foundations, such as colleges and
hospitals, where there is an endowment of lands, the law
distinguishes, and makes two species of foundation; the one _fundatio
incipiens_, or the incorporation, in which sense the king is the
general founder of all colleges and hospitals; the other _fundatio
perficiens_, or the dotation of it, in which sense the first gift of
the revenues is the foundation, and he who gives them is in law the
founder: and it is in this last sense that we generally call a man the
founder of a college or hospital[b]. But here the king has his
prerogative: for, if the king and a private man join in endowing an
eleemosynary foundation, the king alone shall be the founder of it.
And, in general, the king being the sole founder of all civil
corporations, and the endower the perficient founder of all
eleemosynary ones, the right of visitation of the former results,
according to the rule laid down, to the king; and of the latter, to
the patron or endower.

[Footnote b: 10 Rep. 33.]

THE king being thus constituted by law the visitor of all civil
corporations, the law has also appointed the place, wherein he shall
exercise this jurisdiction: which is the court of king's bench; where,
and where only, all misbehaviours of this kind of corporations are
enquired into and redressed, and all their controversies decided. And
this is what I understand to be the meaning of our lawyers, when they
say that these civil corporations are liable to no visitation; that
is, that the law having by immemorial usage appointed them to be
visited and inspected by the king their founder, in his majesty's
court of king's bench, according to the rules of the common law, they
ought not to be visited elsewhere, or by any other authority. And this
is so strictly true, that though the king by his letters patent had
subjected the college of physicians to the visitation of four very
respectable persons, the lord chancellor, the two chief justices, and
the chief baron; though the college had accepted this charter with all
possible marks of acquiescence, and had acted under it for near a
century; yet, in 1753, the authority of thi