The appearance of the Note Book showed that Cambridge possessed a scholar who could edit a big medieval text with as sure a touch as Stubbs, and the book received a warm welcome from those who were entitled to judge of its merits. It had been a costly book to prepare and it was brought out at Maitland's own charges. In the introduction he took occasion to point out that in other countries important national records were apt to be published by national enterprise; and that in England the wealth of unpublished records was exceptional. "We have been embarrassed by our riches, our untold riches. The nation put its hand to the work and turned back faint-hearted. Foreigners print their records; we, it must be supposed, have too many records to be worth printing; so there they lie, these invaluable materials for the history of the English people, unread, unknown, almost untouched save by the makers of pedigrees." As an advertisement of these unknown treasures no more fortunate selection could have been made than this manuscript note book which could with so high a degree of probability be associated with the famous name of Bracton. But Maitland was not content with urging that the publication of our unknown legal records should not be left to depend upon the chance enthusiasm of isolated scholars; he demanded, as things necessary to the progress of his subject, a sound text of Bracton's treatise and a history of English Law from the thirteenth century. In 1888 there was by reason of the death of Dr Birkbeck a vacancy in the Downing Chair of the Laws of England. Maitland stood and was elected. His Inaugural Lecture delivered in the Arts School on 13th October, 1888, was entitled, "Why the History of Law is not written." The reason was not a lack of material; on the contrary England possessed a series of records which "for continuity, catholicity, minute detail and authoritative value has--I believe that we may safely say it--no equal, no rival in the world," nor yet the difficulty of treating the material, for owing to the early centralization of justice, English history possessed a wonderful unity. Rather it was "the traditional isolation of English Law from every other study" and the fact that practising lawyers are required to know a little medieval law not as it was in the middle ages, but as interpreted by modern courts to suit modern facts. "A mixture of legal dogma and legal history is in general an unsatisfactory compound. I do not say that there are not judgments and text books which have achieved the difficult task of combining the results of deep historical research with luminous and accurate exposition of existing law--neither confounding the dogma nor perverting the history; but the task is difficult. The lawyer must be orthodox otherwise he is no lawyer; an orthodox history seems to me a contradiction in terms. If this truth is hidden from us by current phrases about 'historical methods of legal