| Frederic William Maitland | |
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Portrait of Frederic William Maitland by Beatrice Lock, 1906 |
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| Born | 28 May 1850 |
| Died | 19 December 1906 (aged 56) |
| Occupation | Historian, Jurist |
| Nationality | English |
| Notable work(s) | Domesday Book and Beyond |
| Spouse(s) | Florence Henrietta Fisher |
| Children | Ermengard, Fredegond |
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Frederic William Maitland (28 May 1850 – 19 December 1906) was an English jurist and historian, generally regarded as the modern father of English legal history.
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He was the son of John Gorham Maitland (1818–1863), and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, being bracketed at the head of the moral sciences tripos of 1872, and winning a Whewell scholarship for international law.[1]
He was called to the bar (Lincoln's Inn) in 1876, and became a competent equity lawyer and conveyancer, but finally devoted himself to comparative jurisprudence and especially the history of English law. In 1884 he was appointed reader in English law at Cambridge, and in 1888 became Downing professor of the laws of England. Despite his generally poor health, his intellectual grasp and wide knowledge and research gradually made him famous as a jurist and historian.
The Squire Law Library of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge contains the Maitland Legal History Room named after him.
He edited many volumes for the Selden Society, including Select Pleas for the Crown, 1200–1225 and Select Pleas in Manorial Courts and The Court Baron. His principal works include:
He also made important contributions to the Cambridge Modern History, the English Historical Review, the Law Quarterly Review, Harvard Law Review and other publications. Maitland delivered the Ford Lectures in 1897.
Posthumous publications by his students, editing their lecture notes based on his lectures, include The Constitutional History of England, Equity, and The Forms of Action at Common Law.
His written style was elegant and lively. His historical method was distinguished by his thorough and sensitive use of historical sources, and by his determinedly historical perspective. Maitland taught his students, and all later historians, not to investigate the history of law purely or mostly by reference to the needs of the present, but rather to consider and seek to understand the past on its own terms. His death in 1906 at Gran Canaria from tuberculosis deprived English law and letters of an outstanding representative.
He married Florence Henrietta Fisher and they had two daughters, Ermengard and Fredegond; after Maitland's death his widow married Francis Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin.
The world-famous Maitland Historical Society of Downing College, Cambridge, is named in honour of Frederic Maitland.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Biographical essays include:
A number of Maitland's works have been reproduced on the McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought
A painting of Maitland (1906) by Beatrice Locke is available from the National Portrait Gallery