Frederic William Maitland

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Historian, lawyer, and legal scholar Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906) was the first major English historian to break with the classic Whiggish interpretation of English legal and constitutional history.

Frederic William Maitland was born in London on May 28, 1850, the son of John Gorham and Emma Daniell Maitland. He was prepared in a number of fortuitous ways for his extraordinary scholarly career. Perhaps most important, the early deaths of both his parents placed him in the care of an aunt who provided him with a series of German governesses from whom he learned the language so well that the whole range of 19th-century German historical scholarship was opened to him at a time when that scholarly tradition was at its peak. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in moral sciences (philosophy) in 1872, he afterward enrolled at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1876.

The year 1879 saw the publication of Maitland's first learned article, which marked the beginning of an extraordinarily productive scholarly career. His work, although specialized, was characterized by a subtle perception and a style of writing so clear and supple that it has never ceased to awe and charm scholars, a circumstance which helps to account for his great reputation as a historian's historian. The most important works of his extensive personal bibliography are History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, with Sir Frederick Pollock (1895; rev. ed. 1898); Domesday Book and Beyond (1897); Township and Borough (1898); Canon Law in England (1898); and English Law and the Renaissance (1901).

Maitland's originality of outlook and his ability to comprehend the essential nature of a scholarly problem made it possible for him to break through the deeply rooted assumptions of English historiography, which had been so widely accepted by 19th-century historical scholarship. He realized that the past had to be understood in its own terms and not in the light of later developments or 19th-century scholarly presuppositions. He tried to see the world of the past through the eyes of men who had lived it. This imaginative transposition sufficed to make his scholarship both original and seminal in its influence upon others.

For Maitland, history was a product of human thoughts and actions which create uncertainties, paradoxes, and confusions that cannot always be resolved by imposing the sometimes false clarity of scholarly analysis. He raised questions and suggested hypotheses within a new context which may be said to have profoundly altered Englishmen's views of their medieval past and to have significantly influenced the whole nature of historical inquiry throughout the English-speaking world. If his specific findings in certain areas of study - parliamentary origins, for example - do not always square with the researches of a later generation, still he suggested the right lines of inquiry. His profound intelligence, his thoroughly Victorian habits of intellectual labor, and the firmness of will which kept him at work in the face of a long illness that forced him to live in a warmer climate during much of his last years all combined to make him "a man of notable goodness and nobility of character and of singularly attractive personality." He died in the Canary Islands on Dec. 19, 1906.

Further Reading

Studies of Maitland include H. A. L. Fisher, Frederic William Maitland: Downing Professor of the Laws of England (1910); A. L. Smith, Frederic William Maitland: Two Lectures and a Bibliography (1908); James R. Cameron, Fredrick William Maitland and the History of English Law (1961); and H. E. Bell, Maitland: A Critical Examination and Assessment (1965).

Additional Sources

Cameron, James Reese, Frederick William Maitland and the history of English law, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977, 1961.

Elton, G. R. (Geoffrey Rudolph), F.W. Maitland, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Frederic William Maitland pioneered the study of early English legal history. A talented and prolific scholar, Maitland imaginatively reconstructed the world of Anglo-Saxon law.

Maitland was born May 28, 1850, in London. He graduated from Cambridge University and then studied law at Lincoln's Inn. He joined the bar in 1876 and soon proved himself a skilled attorney. Maitland's interests subsequently 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. In that year he left his law practice and became a reader in English law at Cambridge. In 1888 he was named a professor of law at Cambridge.

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. Maitland contributed many introductions to society publications, which mainly consisted of reprints of primary legal documents. Finally, Maitland was a popular lecturer. His published lectures include Constitutional History of England (1908), Equity (1909), and The Forms of Action (1909).

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.

Maitland's historiography was not based on ideology or theory. History, to Maitland, was not the product of impersonal social or economic forces, but something more complex. Therefore, in the world described in his writings, individual personalities, particular events, cultural traditions, and the peculiarity of language play significant roles. Running through his work is a deep respect for the toughness, resiliency, and vitality of English common law. Common-law lawyers and judges are intellectual and moral heroes in his evocation of medieval England.

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 December 19, 1906, at Las Palmas, Canary Islands.

Quotes:

"The hunger and thirst for knowledge, the keen delight in the chase, the good humored willingness to admit that the scent was false, the eager desire to get on with the work, the cheerful resolution to go back and begin again, the broad good sense, the unaffected modesty, the imperturbable temper, the gratitude for any little help that was given -- all these will remain in my memory though I cannot paint them for others."