Rome with the Pope at its head...." Even a large company, trading with a joint-stock with vendible shares and a handsome measure of "limited liability," could be constructed by means of a trust deed without any incorporation. Aided by this "loose trust-concept," under the shelter of which organic groups of the most various kinds could live and prosper, English lawyers were not vitally concerned with the theory of the Corporation. The law of the Corporation was only one part, and probably not the most important part, of the English fellowship-law, but in Germany, where no such convenient shelter had been provided for the "unincorporate body," the case was different, and active discussion had raged round the nature of the Corporation. The fiction theory invented by Sinibald Fieschi, who became Pope Innocent IV in 1243, and developed and expounded by Savigny, had proved itself inadequate in an age of joint-stock companies and railway collisions; and in the rising tide of German nationalism men were prone to question the validity of a conception derived from the alien jurisprudence of Rome. A new school of thinkers arose preaching the theory of the Genossenschaft or Fellowship. They held that the German Fellowship was neither fictitious nor State-made, that it was "a living organism, and a real person with body and members and will of its own," a group-person with a group-will. The most important representative of this new school of German realists was Dr Gierke, whose work Maitland introduced to the British public after his first winter exile in Grand Canary. Maitland had followed with unflagging interest and steady enthusiasm the great outburst of legal literature in Germany which preceded the construction of the German Civil Code. Of the Code itself he wrote that "it was the most carefully considered statement of a nation's law that the world has ever seen"; while he found in the legal debate of the Germanist and Romanist schools work which sometimes showed "a delicacy of touch and a subtlety of historical perception," of which Englishmen, "having no pressing need for comparison," could know little. For the purpose which Maitland had in view, the explanation of the way in which Englishmen had conceived of group life in its various embodiments, this subtle and delicate treatment of the forms of legal thought, this "ideal morphology" of the Germans, was no less full of suggestion than the ample historical science with which it was supported. It provided tests, and suggested those points of analogy and contrast between English and German development, which give to Maitland's treatment of the Corporate and Unincorporate Body the quality of an original discourse upon the legal and political theory of Western Europe.