Occupation Historian, Jurist Role Historian Name Frederic Maitland | Signature Nationality English Children Fredegond Shove | |
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Born 28 May 1850London ( 1850-05-28 ) Notable works The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward IThe Constitutional History Of England Spouse Florence Henrietta Darwin (m. 1886–1906) Books Domesday book and beyond, The constitutional history of, The forms of action at common l, Equity; a course of lectures, English Law And the Renai Similar People | ||
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.
Contents
- Early life and education
- Bar and early scholarship
- Meeting with Vinogradoff
- Return to Cambridge
- Final years
- Assessment
- Personal life
- Honours
- Works
- Essays
- Other
- References
Early life and education
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 College and Trinity College, Cambridge, A dislike of Classics had initially driven Maitland to read Mathematics, before reading for the Moral Sciences Tripos. He was bracketed at the head of the moral sciences tripos of 1872, and won the Whewell scholarship for international law in 1873. He was a Cambridge Apostle and Secretary, then President, of the Cambridge Union.
Both Maitland's father and grandfather died when Maitland was a schoolboy; from his grandfather he inherited land in Gloucestershire.
Bar and early scholarship
Having been unsuccessful in obtaining a fellowship in Philosophy at Trinity in 1875, 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. 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."
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. 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 from tuberculosis and is buried in the English Cemetery in Las Palmas.
Assessment
Maitland's reputation has stood high since his death. Speaking in 1980, S. F. C. Milson said that Maitland is "not just revered but loved" by historians, while in 1985, Sir Geoffrey Elton wrote of Maitland as the "patron saint" of historians.
Personal life
Maitland married Florence Henrietta Fisher, daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher, in 1886 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 held 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.
Upon his death, the University of Oxford presented an address of condolence to Cambridge, described by Sir Geoffrey Elton as an "unprecedented tribute."
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.
Works
His principal works include: