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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]
Maitland was the grandson of Samuel Roffey Maitland (1792–1866) and 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 the Whewell scholarship for international law.[2] He was a Cambridge Apostle and president of the Cambridge Union.
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 he was elected as 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 Cambridge Modern History, the English Historical Review, the Law Quarterly Review, Harvard Law Review and other publications. Maitland delivered the Ford Lectures in 1897.
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."[3]
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 judgements: "The forms of action we have buried but still they rule us from their graves."
His written style was elegant and lively.[4] 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. He died in 1906 at Gran Canaria[5] from tuberculosis and is buried in the English Cemetery in Las Palmas.
Maitland married Florence Henrietta Fisher, daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher, in 1886[6] 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.
Maitland held honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Glasgow. He was one of the founding fellows of the British Academy, 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, which he declined.
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.[7]
His principal works include:[6]
University of Cambridge, Isaac Newton, St John's College, Cambridge, Henry VIII of England, Bertrand Russell
Law, Justice, Thomas Aquinas, Critical legal studies, Aristotle
Trinity College, Cambridge, St John's College, Cambridge, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, Darwin College, Cambridge
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, Colleges of the University of Oxford, Jesus College, Oxford
English law, Law, Common law, England, Canon Law
Real Estate, God, Christianity, Devon, Latin
Magna Carta, Henry I of England, United Kingdom, Normandy, Kingdom of Great Britain
Australia, English law, United States, Harvard Law School, Queen's Counsel