Frederick William Maitland, Downing Professor of the Laws of England: A Biographical SketchFisher, H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
History
Frederick William Maitland, Downing Professor of the Laws of England: A Biographical Sketch
Fisher, H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
Maitland, Frederic William, 1850-1906
Cambridge offered opportunities for study such as Maitland had not yet
enjoyed. A little volume on Justice and Police, contributed to the
English Citizen series and designed to interest the general reading
public, came out in 1885, and affords good evidence of Maitland's
firm grasp of the Statute book and of his easy command of historical
perspective. But this book, excellent as it is, did not represent the
deeper and more original side of Maitland's activity any more than an
admirable series of lectures upon Constitutional History which were
greatly appreciated by undergraduate audiences but never published
in his lifetime. The Reader in English Law was by no means satisfied
with providing excellent lectures covering the whole field of English
Constitutional history, though he had much that was fresh and true
to say about the Statutes of the eighteenth century and about the
degree to which the theories of Blackstone were applicable to modern
conditions, and though he drew a picture for his undergraduate audience
which in some important respects was closer to fact than Walter
Bagehot's famous sketch of the English Constitution published while
Maitland was an Eton boy. Text book and Lectures were but interludes in
the main operations of the campaign against the unconquered fastnesses
of medieval law. First came a remarkable series of articles contributed
to the _Law Quarterly Review_ upon the medieval doctrine of seisin
which Maitland's sure insight had discerned to be the central feature
in the land law of the Norman and Angevin period: and then in 1887
Bracton's Note Book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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