Frederick William Maitland

Working partly for Mr Rogers and partly for Mr Bradley Dyne, Maitland saw a good deal of conveyancing business and in after years was wont to lay stress upon the value of this part of his education. Conveyancing is a fine art, full of delicate technicalities, and Maitland used to say that there could be no better introduction to the study of ancient diplomata than a few years spent in the chambers of a busy conveyancer. Here every document was made to yield up its secret; every word and phrase was important, and the habit of balancing the precise practical consequences of seemingly indifferent and conventional formulæ became engrained in the mind. Paleography might teach men to read documents, diplomatics to date them and to test their authenticity; but the full significance of an ancient deed might easily escape the most exact paleographer and the most accomplished diplomatist, for the want of that finished sense for legal technicality which is the natural fruit of a conveyancing practice.8

Business of this type, however, does not provide opportunities for forensic oratory and Maitland's voice was rarely heard in Court9. But meanwhile he was rapidly exploring the vast province of legal science, mastering the Statute Books, reading Frenchmen, Germans and Americans, and occasionally contributing articles upon philosophical and legal topics to the Press.

To the deepest and most serious minds the literature of knowledge is also the literature of power. Maitland's outlook and ideal were at the period of intellectual virility greatly affected by two books, Savigny's Geschichte des Römischen Rechts and Stubbs' Constitutional History. The English book he found in a London Club and "read it because it was interesting," falling perhaps, as he afterwards suggested, for that very reason "more completely under its domination than those who have passed through schools of history are likely to fall." Of the German he used to say that Savigny first opened his eyes as to the way in which law should be regarded.

Justinian's Pandects only make preciseWhat simply sparkled in men's eyes before,Twitched in their brow or quivered in their lip,Waited the speech that called but would not come10.

Law was a product of human life, the expression of human needs, the declaration of the social will; and so a rational view of law would be won only from some height whence it would be possible to survey the great historic prospect which stretches from the Twelve Tables and the Leges Barbarorum to the German Civil Code and the judgments reported in the morning newspaper. Readers of Bracton's Note Book will remember Maitland's description of Azo as "the Savigny of the thirteenth century," as a principal source from which our greatest medieval jurist obtained a rational conception of the domain of law. Savigny did not write the same kind of book as Azo. He worked in a different medium and on a larger canvas but with analogous effects. He made the principles of legal development intelligible by exhibiting them in the vast framework of medieval Latin and Teutonic civilization and as part of the organic growth of the Western nations. Maitland's early enthusiasm for the German master took a characteristic form: he began a translation of the history.

The translation of Savigny was neither completed nor published. Maitland's first contribution to legal literature was an anonymous article which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1879. This was not primarily an historical disquisition though it displayed a width of historical knowledge surprising in so young a man, but a bold, eloquent, and humorous plea for a sweeping change in the English law of Real Property. "Let all Property be personal property. Abolish the heir at law." This alteration in the law of inheritance would lead to great simplification and would remove much ambiguity, injustice and cost. Nothing short of this would do anything worth doing. A few little changes had been made in the past, "for accidents will happen in the best regulated museums," but it was no use recommending timid subsidiary changes while the central anomaly, the source of all complexity and confusion, was permitted to continue. "It is not unlikely," remarked the author with grave irony, "that we are behind an age whose chief ambition is to be behind itself."

The article exhibits a quality of mind which is worth attention. Maitland never allowed his clear strong common sense to be influenced by that vague emotion which the conventional imagination of half-informed people readily draws from antiquity. He loved the past but never defended an institution because it was old. He saw antiquity too vividly for that. And so despite the ever increasing span of his knowledge he retained to the end the alert temper of a reformer, ready to consider every change upon its merits, and impelled by a natural proclivity of mind to desire a state of society in some important respects very different from that which he found existing. At the same time he is far too subtle a reasoner to acquiesce in the doctrinaire logic of Natural Rights or in some expositions of social philosophy which pretended to refinements superior to those provided by empirical utilitarianism. Two early articles contributed to the pages of Mind on Mr Herbert Spencer's Theory of Society contain a modest but very sufficient exposure of the shortcomings of that popular philosopher's a priori reasoning in politics.

With these serious pursuits there was mingled a great deal of pleasant recreation. Holidays were spent in adventurous walking and climbing in the Tyrol, in Switzerland, and among the rolling fir-clad hills of the Black Forest, for Maitland as a young man was a swift and enduring walker, with the true mountaineer's contempt for high roads and level places. We hear of boating expeditions on the Thames, of visits to burlesques and pantomimes, of amusing legal squibs and parodies poured out to order without any appearance of effort. From childhood upwards music had played a large part in Maitland's life and now that the shadow of the Tripos was removed he was able to gratify his musical taste to the full. In 1873 he spent some time alone in Munich, listening to opera night after night and then travelled to Bonn that he might join his sisters at the Schumann Commemoration. Those were the days when the star of Richard Wagner was fast rising above the horizon and though he was not prepared to burn all his incense at one shrine, Maitland was a good Wagnerian. In London musical taste was experiencing a revival, the origin of which dated back, perhaps, to the starting of the Saturday Concerts at the Crystal Palace by August Manns in 1855. The musical world made pilgrimages to the Crystal Palace to listen to the orchestral compositions of Schubert and Schumann or to the St James' Hall popular concerts, founded in 1859, to enjoy the best chamber music of the greatest composers. New developments followed, the first series of the Richter Concerts in 1876 and the first performance of Wagner's Ring in 1882. Maitland with his friend Cyprian Williams regularly attended concert and opera. Without claiming to be an expert he had a good knowledge of music and a deep delight in it. One of his chief Cambridge friends, Edmund Gurney, best known perhaps as one of the principal founders of the Society for Psychical Research, wrote a valuable book on The Power of Sound and interested Maitland in the philosophy of their favourite art. "I walked once with E. Gurney in the Tyrol," Maitland wrote long afterwards, "What moods he had! On a good day it was a joy to hear him laugh!" Gurney died prematurely in 1888 and the increasing stress of work came more and more between Maitland and the concert room; but problems of sound continued to exercise a certain fascination over his mind and his last paper contributed to the Eranos Club at Cambridge on May 8, 1906, and entitled with characteristic directness "Do Birds Sing?" was a speculation as to the conditions under which articulate sound passes into music.

That by the natural workings of his enthusiastic genius Maitland would have been drawn to history whatever might have been the outward circumstances of his career, is as certain as anything can be in the realm of psychological conjecture. Men of the ordinary fibre are confronted by alternatives which are all the more real and painful by reason of their essential indifference. This career is open to them or that career, and they can adapt themselves with equal comfort to either. But the man of genius follows his star. His life acquires a unity of purpose which stands out in contrast to the confused and blurred strivings of lesser men. Other things he might do, other tastes he might gratify; but there is one thing that he can do supremely well, one taste which becomes a passion, which swallows up all other impulses, and for which he is prepared to sacrifice money and health and the pleasures of society and many other things which are prized among men.

When Maitland stood for the Trinity Fellowship he was already aware that success at the bar would mean the surrender of the reading which had "become very dear" to him, and yet his ambition desired success of one kind or another. The varied humours of his profession pleased him; he loved the law and all its ways; yet it is difficult to believe that the routine of a prosperous equity business would ever have satisfied so comprehensive and enquiring a mind. The young barrister had a soul for something beyond drafts; he lectured on political economy and political philosophy in manufacturing towns and in London11, wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, then a liberal evening paper under the direction of Mr John Morley; but more and more he was drawn to feel the fascination and importance of legal history. Two friends helped to determine his course. Mr, now Sir Frederick, Pollock had preceded Maitland by six years at Eton and Trinity and was also a member of Lincoln's Inn. Coming of a famous legal family, and himself already rising to distinction as a scientific lawyer, Mr Pollock appreciated both the value of English legal history and the neglect into which it had been allowed to fall. He sought out Maitland and a friendship was formed between the two men which lasted in unbroken intimacy and frequent intellectual communion to the end. An historical note on the classification of the Forms of Personal Action, contributed to his friend's book on the Law of Torts, was the first overt evidence of the alliance.

The other friend was a Russian. Professor Paul Vinogradoff, of Moscow, who had received his historical education in Mommsen's Seminar in Berlin, happened in 1884 to be paying a visit in England. The Russian scholar, his superb instinct for history fortified by the advantages of a system of training such as no British University could offer, had, in a brief visit to London, learnt something about the resources of our Public Record Office which was hidden from the Inns of Court and from the lecture rooms of Oxford and Cambridge. On January 20, Maitland and Vinogradoff chanced to meet upon one of Leslie Stephen's Sunday tramps, concerning which there will be some words hereafter, and at once discovered a communion of tastes. The two men found that they were working side by side and brushing one another in their researches. Correspondence followed of a learned kind; then on Sunday, May 11, there was a decisive meeting at Oxford. The day was fine and the two scholars strolled into the Parks, and lying full length on the grass took up the thread of their historical discourse. Maitland has spoken to me of that Sunday talk; how from the lips of a foreigner he first received a full consciousness of that matchless collection of documents for the legal and social history of the middle ages, which England had continuously preserved and consistently neglected, of an unbroken stream of authentic testimony flowing for seven hundred years, of tons of plea-rolls from which it would be possible to restore an image of long-vanished life with a degree of fidelity which could never be won from chronicles and professed histories. His vivid mind was instantly made up: on the following day he returned to London, drove to the Record Office, and being a Gloucestershire man and the inheritor of some pleasant acres in that fruitful shire asked for the earliest plea-roll of the County of Gloucester. He was supplied with a roll for the year 1221, and without any formal training in paleography proceeded to puzzle it out and to transcribe it.

The Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester which appeared in 1884 with a dedication to Paul Vinogradoff is a slim and outwardly insignificant volume; but it marks an epoch in the history of history. "What is here transcribed," observes the editor, "is so much of the record of the Gloucestershire eyre of 1221 as relates to pleas of the Crown. Perhaps it may be welcome, not only to some students of English law, but also (if such a distinction be maintainable) to some students of English history. It is a picture, or rather, since little imaginative art went to its making, a photograph of English life as it was early in the thirteenth century, and a photograph taken from a point of view at which chroniclers too seldom place themselves. What is there visible in the foreground is crime, and crime of a vulgar kind – murder and rape and robbery. This would be worth seeing even were there no more to be seen, for crime is a fact of which history must take note; but the political life of England is in a near background. We have here, as it were, a section of the body politic which shows just those most vital parts, of which, because they were deep-seated, the soul politic was hardly conscious, the system of local government and police, the organization of county, hundred, and township."

It was the publication of a new and fundamental type of authority accomplished with affectionate and exquisite diligence by a scholar who had a keen eye for the large issues as well as for the minutiæ of the text. And it came at a timely moment. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's History of Criminal Law had recently appeared and Maitland has written of it in terms of genuine admiration; but remarkable as those volumes undoubtedly were, miraculous even, if regard be paid to the competing claims upon the author's powers, they did not pretend to extend the boundaries of medieval knowledge. The task of making discoveries in the field of English legal antiquity, of utilizing the material which had been brought to light by the Record Commission appeared to have devolved upon Germans and Americans. All the really important books were foreign – Brunner's Schwurgerichte, Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica and History of Procedure in England, the Harvard Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law, Holmes' brilliant volume on the Common Law. Of one great name indeed England could boast. Sir Henry Maine's luminous and comprehensive genius had drawn from the evidence of early law a number of brilliant and fascinating conclusions respecting the life and development of primitive society, and had applied an intellectual impulse which made itself felt in every branch of serious historical enquiry. But the very seductions of Maine's method, the breadth of treatment, the all-prevailing atmosphere of nimble speculation, the copious use of analogy and comparison, the finish and elasticity of the style were likely to lead to ambitious and ill-founded imitations. It is so pleasant to build theories; so painful to discover facts. Maitland was strong enough to resist the temptation to premature theorizing about the beginnings of human society. As an undergraduate he had seen that simplicity had been the great enemy of English Political Philosophy; and as a mature student he came to discover how confused and indistinct were the thoughts of our forefathers, and how complex their social arrangements. What those thoughts and arrangements were he determined to discover, by exploring the sources published and unpublished for English legal history. He knew exactly what required to be done, and gallantly faced long hours of unremunerative drudgery in the sure and exultant faith that the end was worth the labour. "Everything which he touched turned to gold." He took up task after task, never resting, never hasting, and each task was done in the right way and in the right order. The study of English legal history was revolutionised by his toil.

Before the fateful meeting with Vinogradoff at Oxford, Maitland had made friends with Leslie Stephen. In 1880 he joined "the goodly company, fellowship or brotherhood of the Sunday tramps," which had been founded in the previous year by Stephen, George Crome Robertson, the Editor of Mind, and Frederick Pollock. "The original members of the Society about ten in number were for the most part addicted to philosophy, but there was no examination, test, oath or subscription, and in course of time most professions and most interests were represented." The rule of the Club was "to walk every other Sunday for about eight months in the year," and so long as Maitland lived in London he was a faithful member of that strenuous company. A certain wet Sunday lived in his memory and, though he did not know it, lived also in the memory of Leslie Stephen. "I was the only tramp who had obeyed the writ of summons, which took the form of a postcard. When the guide (we had no 'president,' certainly no chairman, only so to speak, a 'preambulator') and his one follower arrived at Harrow station, the weather was so bad that there was nothing for it but to walk back to London in drenching rain; but that day, faithful alone among the faithless found, I learnt something of Stephen, and now I bless the downpour which kept less virtuous men indoors." That wet Sunday made Maitland a welcome guest at the Stephen's house; and it brought other happiness in its train. In 1886 Maitland was married in the village church of Brockenhurst, Hants, to Florence Henrietta, eldest daughter of Mr Herbert Fisher, some time Vice Warden of the Stannaries, and niece of Mrs Leslie Stephen. Two daughters, the elder born in 1887, and the younger in 1889, were the offspring of the marriage.

III

Meanwhile Maitland had been recalled from London to his old University. The reading which had been "very dear to him" when he took the first plunge into London work, had become dearer in proportion as the opportunities for indulging in it became more restricted. He was earning an income at the bar which, though not large, was adequate to his needs, but a barrister's income is uncertain and Maitland may have felt that while he had no assured prospect of improving his position at the bar, the life of a successful barrister, if ever success were to come to him, would entail an intellectual sacrifice which he was not prepared to face. Accordingly in 1883 he offered himself for a Readership in English Law in the University of Oxford, but without success. A distinguished Oxford man happened to be in the field and the choice of the electors fell, not unnaturally, upon the home-bred scholar. But meanwhile a movement was on foot in the University of Cambridge to found a Readership in English Law. In a Report upon the needs of the University issued in June, 1883, the General Board of Studies had included in an appendix a statement from the Board of Legal Studies urging that two additional teachers in English Law should be established as assistants to the Downing Professor. Nothing however was done and the execution of the project might have been indefinitely postponed but for the generosity of Professor Henry Sidgwick, who offered to pay £300 a year from his own stipend for four years if a Readership could be established. Sidgwick's action was clearly dictated by a general view of the educational needs of the University, but he had never lost sight of his old pupil and no doubt realised that Maitland was available and that he was not unlikely to be elected. The Senate accepted the generous offer, the Readership was established, and on November 24, 1884, Maitland was elected to be Reader of English Law in the University of Cambridge. In the Lent term of 1885 he gave his first course of lectures on the English Law of Contracts.

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.

"Twice in the history of England has an Englishman had the motive, the courage, the power to write a great readable reasonable book about English Law as a whole." The task which William Blackstone achieved in the middle of the eighteenth century, Henry de Bratton, a judge of the King's Court, accomplished in the reign of Henry III. His elaborate but uncompleted treatise De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ, composed in the period which lies between the legal reforms of Henry II. and the great outburst of Edwardian legislation, while the Common law of England was still plastic and baronage and people were claiming from the King a stricter observance of the great Charter, is naturally the most important single authority for our medieval legal history. Though influenced by the categories and scientific spirit of Roman Law, Henry de Bratton was essentially English, essentially practical. His book was based upon the case law of his own age —Et sciendum est quod materia est facta et casus qui quotidie emergunt et eveniunt in regno Angliæ– and especially upon the plea-rolls of two contemporary judges, Walter Raleigh and William Pateshull. An edition in six volumes executed for the Rolls Series by Sir Travers Twiss had been completed in 1883, the year before Maitland paid his first visit to the Record Office and discovered the plea-rolls of the County of Gloucester; but the text was faulty and far from creditable to English scholarship.

On July 19, 1884, Professor Vinogradoff, "who in a few weeks" wrote Maitland, "learned, as it seems to me, more about Bracton's text than any Englishman has known since Selden died," published a letter in the Athenæum drawing attention to a manuscript in the British Museum, which contained "a careful and copious collection of cases" for the first twenty-four years of Henry III., a collection valuable in any case, since many of the rolls from which it was copied have long since been lost, but deriving an additional and peculiar importance from the probability that it was compiled for Bracton's use, annotated by his own hand and employed as the groundwork of his treatise. Yet, even if the connection with Bracton could not be established, a manuscript containing no fewer than two thousand cases from the period between 1217 and 1240 was too precious a discovery to be neglected. Here was a mass of first-hand material, valuable alike for the genealogist, the lawyer, the student of social history: – glimpses of archaic usage, of local custom, evidence of the spread of primogeniture, important decisions affecting the status of the free man who held villein lands, records of villein service, vivid little fragments of family story, some of it tragic, some of it squalid, as well as passages of general historical interest, entries concerning "the partition and therefore the destruction of the Palatinate of Chester" or the reversal of the outlawing of Hubert de Burgh the great justiciar who at one time "held the kingdom of England in his hand."