Frederic William Maitland

Frederic William Maitland
Portrait of Frederic William Maitland by Beatrice Lock, 1906
Born	(1850-05-28)28 May 1850 London
Died	19 December 1906(1906-12-19) (aged 56) Gran Canaria
Occupation	Historian, jurist
Nationality	English
Notable works	The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I The Constitutional History of England
Spouse	Florence Henrietta Fisher
Children	Ermengard, Fredegond
Signature

Frederic William Maitland, FBA (28 May 1850 – 19 December 1906) was an English historian and lawyer who is generally regarded as the modern father of English legal history.^[1]

Early life

Maitland was born at 53 Guilford Street, London, the only son of John Gorham Maitland (1818–1863) and of Emma, daughter of John Frederic Daniell. His grandfather was Samuel Roffey Maitland. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, being bracketed at the head of the moral sciences tripos of 1872, and winning the Whewell scholarship for international law.^[2] He was a Cambridge Apostle and President of the Cambridge Union.^[3]

Career

Bar and early scholarship

Having been unsuccessful in obtaining a fellowship in philosophy at Trinity, Maitland was called to the bar by 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. He began a book on property law, but abandoned it out of frustration at certain features of English property law; he expressed these sentiments in an anonymous article in the Westminster Review in 1879, followed by three further articles in the Law Magazine and Review between 1881 and 1883.

Meeting with Vinogradoff

In 1880, Maitland was introduced by Frederick Pollock, who had been to Eton and Cambridge with him, to the Sunday Tramps, a walking club founded by Leslie Stephen. Through the Tramps, Maitland was introduced in 1884 to Paul Vinogradoff, a Russian medievalist who was in England to study records lodged in the Public Records Office (PRO). Maitland would later write that the day of their meeting "determined the rest of my life". Maitland's biographer and brother-in-law, H. A. L. Fisher, later claimed that he was so chagrined by the fact that a Russian knew more about English legal records than he did that he made his first visit to the PRO shortly thereafter, though Geoffrey Elton points out that Maitland had already been working in the archives before he met Vinogradoff.

The result of Maitland's work was Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester (1884), an edition of an 1221 Gloucestershire eyre roll, which he published at his own expense and dedicated to Vinogradoff.

Return to Cambridge

In 1884, Maitland was also elected Reader in English law at Cambridge, having failed to be elected to a readership at Oxford the previous year.^[3] In 1888 he was elected 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.

Maitland was the Selden Society's first literary editor from 1887 to 1895, and edited many volumes for the organisation, including Select Pleas for the Crown, 1200–1225 and Select Pleas in Manorial Courts and The Court Baron. 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 Lecture in 1897 (later published as Township and Borough) and the Rede Lecture in 1901.

His most important work was The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, which appeared in 1895. Co-authored with his friend Frederick Pollock (who only wrote the chapter on Anglo-Saxon law), The History of English Law has been described as "the best book on English legal history ever published in the English language."^[4]

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. The latter publication has been repeatedly reprinted, and contains perhaps his most-quoted observation, which still appears in learned articles and superior court judgments: "The forms of action we have buried but still they rule us from their graves."

His written style was elegant and lively.^[5] 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.

Final years

Maitland's health began to deteriorate in the 1890s: the exact nature of his illness remains unclear, but has been variously ascribed to tuberculosis or to diabetes. In 1898 he suffered from an attack of pleurisy, and thereafter he wintered either in the Canary Islands or in Madeira. In December 1906, he left Cambridge for the Canaries for the last time: during the trip, he contracted influenza, which turned into double pneumonia.

He died in 1906 at Gran Canaria^[6] from tuberculosis and is buried in the English Cemetery in Las Palmas.

Personal life

Maitland married Florence Henrietta Fisher, daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher, in 1886^[7] and they had two daughters, Ermengard (1887–1968) and Fredegond (1889–1949); after Maitland's death his widow married Sir Francis Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin. Florence Fisher's brother, the Liberal scholar and politician H. A. L. Fisher, edited Maitland's papers and lectures on English constitutional history after his death.

Honours

Maitland received honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow and Cracow. He was one of the founding fellows of the British Academy, an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and honorary bencher of Lincoln's Inn. In 1902, the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, offered him the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge in succession to Lord Acton, which he declined.^[3]

Upon his death, the University of Oxford presented an address of condolence to Cambridge, described by Geoffrey Elton as an "unprecedented tribute."^[8]

The Squire Law Library of the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge contains the Maitland Legal History Room. The Maitland Historical Society of Downing College, Cambridge, is named in his honour. He is commemorated in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the first professional historian to be so honoured.^[9]

See also

• Otto von Gierke
• Herbert Fisher
• Henry de Bracton
• Paul Vinogradoff
• Social law
• Quia Emptores, Seisin and Cestui que

Works

His principal works include:^[7]

• Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester before the Abbot of Reading and his Fellows Justices Itinerant, Macmillan & Co., 1884.
• Justice and Police, Macmillan & Co., 1885.
• Bracton's Note-Book, Vol. 2, C. J. Clay & Sons, 1887 [reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010]. ISBN 978-1-108-01031-3)
• History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, with Sir Frederick Pollock, Cambridge University Press, 1899 [1st Pub. 1895; new ed. 1898].
• Domesday Book and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 1897.
• Township and Borough: Being the Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in the October Term of 1897, Cambridge University Press, 1898.
• Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, Methuen & Co., 1898.
• English Law and the Renaissance: the Rede Lecture for 1901, Cambridge University Press, 1901.
• Charters of the Borough of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1901 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-108-01043-6)
• Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, Duckworth & Co., 1906.^[10]
• The Constitutional History of England, Cambridge University Press, 1909 [1st Pub. 1908].
• Equity. Also the Forms of Action at Common Law, Edited by A.H. Chaytor and W.J. Whittaker, Cambridge University Press, 1910.
• The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, H.A.L. Fisher, ed., Vol. I, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
• The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, H.A.L. Fisher, ed., Vol. II, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
• The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, H.A.L. Fisher, ed., Vol. III, Cambridge University Press, 1911.
• A Sketch of English Legal History, with Francis G. Montague, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915.
• The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, Selden Society, 1965.

Essays

• "The Relation of Punishment to Temptation," Mind, Vol. V, 1880.
• "The Criminal Liability of the Hundred," The Law Magazine and Review, Vol. VII, 1882.
• "Mr. Herbert Spencer's Theory of Society," Part II, Mind, Vol. VIII, 1883.
• "From the Old Law Courts to the New," The English Illustrated Magazine, Vol. I, 1883.
• "The Seisin of Chattels," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. I, 1885.
• "The Deacon and the Jewess: or, Apostasy at Common Law," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. II, 1886.
• "The Mystery of Seisin," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. II, 1886.
• "The Suitors of the County Court," The English Historical Review, Vol. III, 1888.
• "The Beatitude of Seisin," Part II, The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. IV, 1888.
• "The Surnames of English Villages", The Archaeological Review, Vol. IV, No. 4, 1889.
• "The Introduction of English Law into Ireland," The English Historical Review, Vol. IV, 1889.
• "The Materials for English Legal History," Part II, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. IV, 1889.
• "The 'Praerogativa Regis'," The English Historical Review, Vol. VI, 1891.
• "Henry II and the Criminous Clerks," The English Historical Review, Vol. VII, 1892.
• "The 'Quatripartitus'," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. VIII, 1892.
• "The History of Cambridgeshire Manor," The English Historical Review, Vol. IX, No. 35, July 1894.
• "The Origin of the Borough," The English Historical Review, Vol. IX, 1896.
• "Wyclif on English and Roman Law," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XII, 1896.
• "'Execrabilis' in the Common Pleas," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XII, 1896.
• "Canon Law in England," The English Historical Review, Vol. XII, 1897.
• "The Corporation Sole," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XVI, 1900, pp. 335–354
• "The Crown as Corporation," The Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XVII, 1901, pp. 131–146
• "Prologue to a History of English Law." In: Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Vol. I. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1907.
• "Materials For the History of English Law." In: Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Vol. II. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908.
• "The History of the Register of Original Writs." In: Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Vol. II. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908.

Other

• "Glanville, Ranulf de." In: Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XXI, 1890.
• "Court Rolls, Manorial Accounts and Extents." In: Dictionary of Political Economy, Vol. I, 1894.
• Essays on the Teaching of History, William Arthur Jobson Archbold, ed., with an introduction by F.W. Maitland, Cambridge University Press, 1901.
• “Bracton, Henry de.” In: Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. IV, (11th ed.), 1911.
• “English Law.” In: Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. IX, (11th ed.), 1911.

Notes

References

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Frederic William Maitland

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frederic William Maitland.

• Works by or about Frederic William Maitland at Internet Archive
• Obituary (From The Times)
• Maitland's works on McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought
• Frederic William Maitland: at Online Library of Liberty
• Works by or about Frederic William Maitland in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Frederic William Maitland at Find a Grave
• Frederic William Maitland at Find a Grave for Florence Henrietta Fisher, later Maitland, later Darwin (Lady)