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        The 19th century was the century in which the craft of history became a thoroughly modern profession. It was the Age of great historians - of Ranke and Mommsen, Burckhardt and Fustel de Caulanges, Macaulay and Maitland, and of that great subverter of accepted pieties, Karl Marx. All these great historians and writers produced imperishable masterpieces, defining new fields and bringing new methods and new perspectives to familiar subject matter. Their books have become imperishable for two reasons. First because they were all great stylists whom we continue to read for sheer pleasure. Second because they were not only great servants of Clio, the Greek muse of history, but also greater servants of her long-time associate, Literature. While these writers did not turn their back on beauty, yet their passion for truth came first. Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906) pioneered the study of early English legal history. A talented and prolific scholar, Maitland imaginatively reconstructed the world of Anglo-Saxon law.

        As a historian of Law and Jurisprudence, Frederic William Maitland has an immortal place in the historic Hall of Fame. To quote Peter Gay and Victor G Wexler: As a historian of Law, Maitland has earned the respect and won the admiration of his colleagues throughout the world. For his devotion to his vocation, the fine qualities of his works, and his intense awareness and understanding of the skills and temperament required of the professional historian, Maitland has, in fact, often been called the historian's historian. But to limit thus the range of his appeal is to do great injustice to his captivating style, which makes all that he has written on subjects as abstruse and technical as exists in legal history delightful reading, even for non-specialists.

Maitland was of the view that it was the historian's proper assignment and even duty not only to discover what men have done and what they have said in the past but also to determine as far as possible what they could or would have thought. In order to achieve this aim, the historian must conquer the almost insurmountable barriers of time and place which separate him from his subject. As a historian, Maitland has been praised for his ability to grasp and articulate the great central themes underlying the development of the common law, and his ability to penetrate and render the inner meaning of words. He enjoyed being a historical detective, sifting through masses of often contradictory and confusing sources to find historical truth. Despite his respect for the English common-law tradition, Maitland was not an antiquarian. He actively supported the major law reform efforts of his day.         The earliest and the most enduring influence that helped to shape Maitland into the historian that he became was that of his grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Roffey Maitland, who was Librarian to the Arch Bishop of Canterbury and the author of several distinguished books on Ecclesiastical History, including 'The Dark Ages' (1844). The elder Maitland convinced his grandson that the greatest obstacle to historical knowledge was the fallacy of an anachronism: the application of modern language and concepts to the life of the Middle Ages. To quote Frederic William Maitland in this context: As difficult as the task may be, the historian must try to divest himself of the associations and circumstances that constitute his own frame of reference if he hopes to achieve the goal of understanding the mentality of a distant Age.

Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906)

        Frederic William Maitland was born May 28, 1850, in London. He graduated from Cambridge University and then studied law at Lincoln's Inn. In 1876, he was called to the bar and soon proved himself a skilled attorney. His associates in the legal profession immediately recognized his exceptional talent and speculated that he would one day become one of England's most celebrated Judges. But this was not to be. Maitland's interests shifted to the history of English law. He set as his goal the writing of a scientific and philosophical history of English law that took into account its interaction with the social, economic, and cultural life of the English people. His first book, Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester, was published to acclaim in 1884.

        Maitland's conversion from the practice of Law to the study of history of law was largely the result of a chance meeting with, and the profound influence of, the Russian Medievalist Paul Vinogradoff. Maitland later wrote to Vinogradoff about their first meeting in 1884: I often think that an extraordinary piece of luck for me it was that you and I met upon a 'Sunday Tramp'. That day determined the rest of my life. Vinogradoff, who was in England in search of materials for a medieval history, impressed Maitland with the importance and vastness of the unexplored treasures for the historian at the Public Record Office in London.

        The first fruit of Maitland's exploration of the Record Office was an edition of a 13th Century Plea Roll in 1884, 'Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester', a work which he dedicated to Vinogradoff and which brought Maitland an appointment as Reader of Law at Cambridge. In 1888 he was named a professor of law at Cambridge.

        In 1887, he published an edition entitled 'Brackton's Notebook', three volumes of notes by a 13th Century Scholar and Jurist, with long excerpts from the official Plea Rolls. In his concluding comments in the 'introduction' to this book, Maitland outlined the importance of this mine of information in his own words thus: English Law is case law, the Plea Rolls contain the ultimate authorities of our law. What would we not give for a book by a medieval lawyer containing a selection of such cases, especially if that lawyer were a great judge and made his selection while the law was still flexible. Such a book chance has preserved to us; it is 'Brackton's Notebook'. Maitland declared that he was interested in writing the type of history in his own words, that would allow by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things to become thinkable once more. Maitland undertook to edit and publish volume upon volume of documents that might help us to decipher the vocabulary and to comprehend what appears to we moderns as the mysterious Middle Ages. Common-law lawyers and judges are intellectual and moral heroes in his evocation of medieval England.

        Between 1885 and 1906, Maitland published many volumes of English history, including Justice and Police (1885), The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (with Sir Frederick Pollock, 1895), and Domesday Book and Beyond (1897). He also helped form the Selden Society, an association devoted to the preservation and analysis of Old English legal history. Finally, Maitland was a popular lecturer. His published lectures include Constitutional History of England (1908), Equity (1909), and The Forms of Action (1909).

        Maitland's historiography was not based on ideology or theory. According to Maitland, history was not the product of impersonal social or economic forces, but something more complex. Therefore, in the world described in his writings on legal history, individual personalities, particular events, cultural traditions, and the peculiarity of language play significant roles. Any discriminating reader can easily discern one vital spirit running through his work, a deep respect for the toughness, resiliency, and vitality of English common law.

        In his inaugural lecture as Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge University in 1888, Maitland explained the current antipathy between legal and historical thinking and how he proposed to close that gap. He said, What is really required of the practising lawyer is not, save in the rarest cases, a knowledge of medieval law as it was in the Middle Ages, but rather a knowledge of medieval law as interpreted by modern courts to suit modern facts. .. .. That process by which old principles and old phrases are charged with a new content is from the lawyer's point of view an evolution of the true intent and meaning of the old law; but from the historian's point of view it is almost of necessity a process of perversion and misunderstanding.

        Maitland defined the nature of the office of historical research. Nowadays we may see the office of historical research as that of explaining and therefore lightening, the pressure that the past must exercise upon the present and the present upon the future. Today we study the day before yesterday, in order that yesterday may not parallyse today, and today may not parallyse tomorrow.

        Though many of Maitland's claims have been qualified or refuted by later research and scholarship, he is recognized as a seminal figure in the study of English legal history. Maitland died 19 December, 1906, at Las Palmas, Canary Islands. Maitland was neighter very wealthy nor in good health most of his life. His death at the young age of 56 brought sadness to the academic community and eulogies from historians in Europe and America. Out of his inner spiritual suffering as a consummate scholar, he won a deeper sympathy for men, and a borader view of things. George Macaulay Trevelyan, the great historian was inspired by Maitland's work. He paid his tribute to Maitland in these words: His contribution as a great scholar can be seen by the fact that Maitland used his legal abilities to open the mind of medieval man and to reveal the nature and growth of his institutions.