The greater portion of the book deals advisedly with a comparatively limited period,--the age which lies between 1154 and 1272. "It is a luminous age throwing light on both past and future. It is an age of good books, the time of Glanvill and Richard FitzNeal, of Bracton and Matthew Paris, an age whose wealth of cartularies, manorial surveys and plea-rolls has of recent years been in part, though only in part, laid open before us in print. Its law is more easily studied than the law of a later time, when no lawyer wrote a treatise, and when the judicial records had grown to so unwieldy a bulk that we can hardly hope that much will ever be known about them. The Year Books--more especially in their present disgraceful plight--- must be very dark to us if we cannot go behind them and learn something about the growth of those 'forms of action' which the fourteenth century inherited as the framework of its law. And if the age of Glanvill and Bracton throws light forward, it throws light backward also. Our one hope of interpreting the _Leges Henrici_, that almost unique memorial of the really feudal stage of legal history, our one hope of coercing Domesday Book to deliver up its hoarded secrets, our one hope of making an Anglo-Saxon land-book mean something definite, seems to lie in an effort to understand the law of the Angevin time as though we ourselves lived in it." Perhaps the most distinct impression which the reader derives from the study of Maitland's work in the _History_ is that he "seemed to understand the law of the Angevin time as though he himself lived in it." We feel that, if he had been going circuit with Walter Raleigh or William Pateshull, his learned brethren would have had little or nothing to tell him which he did not already know. The case law of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--so far as it has survived in plea-rolls or chronicles or legal collections--was part of the familiar furniture of his mind. He knew it all and enjoyed it all in every one of its facets human and lawyerly. And with this he combined a remarkable capacity for appreciating the general tone and colour of legal thinking in that remote age. If the thinking was fluid and indistinct, Maitland would not attempt to make it clearer or more consistent than it really was. The vagueness would be analysed and measured. The opaque thought would be exhibited in its fluctuating and conflicting subconscious elements. We are always being reminded of that wise saying in the Fellowship Dissertation, that English political philosophy has suffered by overmuch simplicity.