Frederick William Maitland. Fisher Herbert Albert Laurens

      Frederick William Maitland / Downing Professor of the Laws of England; A Biographical Sketch

      PREFATORY NOTE

      Whatever merit this Memoir may possess it owes to Maitland and to the circle of those who cherish his memory. My own disabilities will be made plain to the reader, but, lest he entertain false expectations, let me explain at the outset that I was educated neither at Eton, nor at Cambridge, nor at Lincoln's Inn, that I am no lawyer, and that I have never received a formal education in the law. Finally, I did not make Maitland's acquaintance till he was in his thirty-seventh year. These are grave shortcomings, and if I do not rehearse the long roll of benefactors who have helped me to repair them, let it not be imputed to a failure in gratitude. I cannot, however, forbear from mentioning five names. Before these sheets went to Press they were read by Mrs Maitland, by Mrs Reynell, by Dr Henry Jackson, by Dr A. W. Verrall and by Professor Vinogradoff. To their intimate knowledge and weighty counsels I owe a deliverance from many errors. Dr Jackson has generously laid upon himself the additional burden of helping me to see the volume through the Press.

      May 1910.

      I

      The life of a great scholar may be filled with activity as intense and continuous as that demanded by any other calling, and yet is in the nature of things uneventful. Or rather it is a story which tells itself not in outward details of perils endured, places visited, appointments held, but in the revelation of the scholar's mind given in his work. Of such revelation there is no stint in the case of Frederic William Maitland. Within his brief span of life he crowded a mass of intellectual achievements which, if regard be had to its quality as well as to its volume, has hardly, if ever, been equalled in the history of English learning. And yet though a long array of volumes stands upon the Library shelves to give witness to Maitland's work, and not only to the work, but to the modest, brilliant and human spirit which shines through it all and makes it so different from the achievement of many learned men, some few words may be fitly said here as to his life and as to the place which he held and holds in our learning.

      He was born on the 28th of May, 1850, at 53 Guilford Street, London, the only son of John Gorham Maitland and Emma Daniell. Father and mother both came of good intellectual lineage. John Gorham Maitland was the son of Samuel Roffey Maitland, the vigorous, learned and unconventional historian whose volume on the Dark Ages, published in 1844, dissipated a good deal of uncritical Protestant tradition. Emma Daniell was the daughter of John Frederic Daniell, a distinguished physicist, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-three, invented the hygrometer and published, as Professor of Chemistry at King's College, a well-known Introduction to Chemical Philosophy.

      Such ancestry, at once historical and scientific, may explain some of Maitland's tastes and aptitudes. Indeed the words in which Dr Jessop has summarised the work of Samuel Maitland might be applied with equal propriety to the grandson. "Animated by a rare desire after simple truth, generously candid and free from all pretence or pedantry, he wrote in a style which was peculiarly sparkling, lucid and attractive." The secret of this stimulating and suggestive quality lay in the fact that Samuel Maitland was a man of independent mind who took nothing for granted and investigated things for himself. In 1891 his grandson wrote the following words to his eldest sister, who asked whether their grandfather's works would live. "Judging him merely as I should judge any other literary man I think him great. It seems to me that he did what was wanted just at the moment when it was wanted and so has a distinct place in the history of history in England. The Facts and Documents (illustrative of the History, Documents and Rites of the Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses) is the book that I admire most. Of course it is a book for the few, but then those few will be just the next generation of historians. It is a book which 'renders impossible' a whole class of existing books. I don't mean physically impossible – men will go on writing books of that class – but henceforth they will not be mistaken for great historians. One has still to do for legal history something of the work which S. R. M. did for ecclesiastical history – to teach men e.g. that some statement about the thirteenth century does not become the truer because it has been constantly repeated, that 'a chain of testimony' is never stronger than its first link. It is the 'method' that I admire in S. R. M. more even than the style or the matter – the application to remote events of those canons of evidence which we should all use about affairs of the present day, e.g. of the rule which excludes hearsay."

      Cambridge and the bar were familiar traditions. Samuel Maitland was a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, who, having been called to the bar, abandoned the professional pursuit of the law for historical research. He took orders, became Librarian at Lambeth, and ultimately retired to Gloucester to read and to write. John Gorham, seventh wrangler, third classic, Chancellor's medallist, crowned a brilliant undergraduate career by a Fellowship in his father's college and was then called to the bar, but finding little practice drifted away into the Civil Service, becoming first, examiner, and afterwards, in succession to his friend James Spedding, secretary to the Civil Service Commission, which last office he held till his death in 1863, at the age of forty-five. That he could write with point and vigour is made clear by a pamphlet upon the Property and Income Tax, published in 1853, but the work of the Civil Service Commission must have left little leisure for writing, and early death cut short the career of a man whose high gifts were as remarkable to his friends as was the modesty with which he veiled them from the world1. Frederic William, too, passed from Cambridge to the law and then away to work more congenial to his rare and original powers.

      Of direct parental influence Maitland can have known little. His mother died in 1851 when he was a baby, and twelve years afterwards, six months before a Brighton preparatory school was exchanged for Eton, he and his two sisters were left fatherless and the sole charge of the family devolved upon Miss Daniell the aunt, who stood in a mother's place. Dr Maitland, the historian, lived on till 1866 and his home in Gloucester, still called Maitland House, was from time to time enlivened by the visits of grandchildren. The fair landscape of Gloucestershire – the wooded slopes of the Cotswolds, the rich pastures of the Severn Valley with the silver thread of river widening into a broad band as it nears the Bristol Channel, the magical outline of the Malvern Hills, the blaze of the nocturnal forges in the Forest of Dean, were familiar to Maitland's boyhood. Gloucestershire was his county, well-known and well-loved. The beautiful old manor-house of Brookthorpe, one of those small grey-stone manor-houses which are the special pride of Gloucestershire, stood upon the lands which had come into the possession of the family through the marriage of Alexander Maitland with Caroline Busby in 1785. Round it in the parishes of Brookthorpe and Harescombe lay "Squire Maitland's" lands – a thriving cheese-making district until Canada began to filch away the favour of its Welsh customers.

      Maitland was at Eton from 1863 to 1869, but failed to become prominent either in work or play. "He played football, was for a while a volunteer, rowed so much that he 'spoilt his style,' spent Sunday afternoons in running to St George's chapel to hear the anthem, and more than once began the holidays by walking home to Kensington2." Long afterwards when the question of compulsory Greek was being hotly debated in the Senate House at Cambridge he spoke with deep feeling of a "boy at school not more than forty years ago who was taught Greek for eight years and never learnt it … who reserved the greater part of his gratitude for a certain German governess … who if he never learnt Greek, did learn one thing, namely, to hate Greek and its alphabet and its accents and its accidence and its syntax and its prosody, and all its appurtenances; to long for the day when he would be allowed to learn something else; to vow that if ever he got rid of that accursed thing never, never again would he open a Greek book or write a Greek word3." We imagine a shy, awkward delicate boy bursting into jets of wittiness at the least provocation, caring for things which other boys did not care for, misliking the classics, especially Greek, but "brought out by Chaucer" as his tutor Mr E. D. Stone reports, and discovering some taste for mathematics and a passionate interest in music. One contemporary remembers his "jolly, curiously-lined face"; another writes that he was regarded as "a thoroughly good fellow," but his striking originality of mind was perhaps only realised by one schoolfellow, Gerald Balfour, who was the sharer of many a Sunday walk and both