With health so broken that even the summers in England seldom passed
without periods of illness and pain Maitland embarked upon one of
the great undertakings of his life, an edition of the _Year Books of
Edward II_. "These Year Books are a precious heritage. They come to us
from life. Some day they will return to life once more at the touch
of some great historian." The spirit in which Maitland approached the
work is indicated by two quotations, the first from Roger North, the
second from Albert Sorel, which are printed on the title page of each
volume. "He (Sergeant Maynard) had such a relish of the old Year Books
that he carried one in his coach to divert him in travel, and said
he chose it before any comedy." "C'est toute la tragédie, toute la
comédie humaine que met en scène sous nos yeux l'histoire de nos lois.
Ne craignons pas de le dire et de le montrer." The edition of these
Year Books printed in the reign of Charles II. from a single inferior
manuscript was imperfect and bad. Maitland determined to show how an
edition should be made, and in his eyes no labour was too great for
such a task. These records were unique, priceless, imcomparable. "Are
they not the earliest reports, systematic reports, continuous reports,
of oral debate? What has the whole world to put by their side? In 1500,
in 1400, in 1300, English lawyers were systematically reporting what
of interest was said in Court. Who else in Europe was trying to do the
like, to get down on paper and parchment the shifting argument, the
retort, the quip, the expletive? Can we, for example, hear what was
really said in the momentous councils of the Church, what was really
said in Constance and Basel, as we can hear what was really said at
Westminster long years before the beginning of 'the conciliar age'?"
The Year Books contained more medieval conversation than had survived
in any other authentic source. The history of law could not be written
without them. "Some day it will seem a wonderful thing that men once
thought that they could write the history of medieval England without
the Year Books."
The Reports began in 1285, and from 1293 the stream was fairly
continuous. "This surely is a memorable event. When duly considered
it appears as one of the great events in English History. To-day men
are reporting at Edinburgh and Dublin, at Boston and San Francisco, at
Quebec and Sydney and Cape Town, at Calcutta and Madras. Their pedigree
is unbroken and indisputable. It goes back to some nameless lawyers
at Westminster to whom a happy thought had come. What they desired
was not a copy of the chilly record, cut and dried, with its concrete
particulars concealing the point of law: the record overladen with the
uninteresting names of litigants and oblivious of the interesting names
of sages, of justices, of sergeants. What they desired was the debate
with the life-blood in it, the twists and turns of advocacy, the quip
courteous and the countercheck quarrelsome. They wanted to remember
what really fell from Bereford, C. J., his proverbs, his sarcasms: how
he emphasised a rule of law by _Noun Dieu_ or _Par Seint Piere_! They
wanted to remember how a clever move of Sergeant Herle drove Sergeant
Toudeby into an awkward corner, or how Sergeant Passeley invented a new
variation on an old defence: and should such a man's name die if the
name of Ruy López is to live?"
Maitland lived to complete three volumes of the Year Books. The French
was printed on one side of the page, a translation executed in terse
and faithful English on the other. Those who were familiar with the
work of the Literary Director of the Selden Society had no cause for
surprise at the exquisite finish of the editing. They were prepared
for an elaborate _apparatus criticus_, for a careful account of the
manuscripts, and for such notes as might be requisite to explain
allusions and to elucidate obscurities. The great discovery, that
the Reports were not official records but the private note books of
law students, was so entirely in Maitland's happy and characteristic
vein, that, although no one else had earned the title to make it,
it was quite natural that it should be made by him. But there was
one feature in the Introduction to the first volume which startled
even his admirers. The editor took occasion to settle the grammar
and syntax of the Anglo-French language, its nouns and its verbs,
its declensions and its tenses. His friends had known him as lawyer,
historian, diplomatist, paleographer, and no exhibition of excellence
in any one of these departments would have afforded them the slightest
sensation of novelty; but they had not divined in him the philologist
and grammarian.
In answer to surprised congratulations, he said, with the quick sparkle
of humour which his friends knew so well, that he would go down to
posterity as the author of "Maitland's law"; he had discovered that
such few Anglo-French verbs as possessed "an imperfect on active
service" rarely employed their preterites. The experts in medieval
French have applauded the work, and the editors of the _Cambridge
History of English Literature_ have thought good to reprint it. In
the course of a winter spent under a blue sky Maitland had made a
really important contribution to medieval philology. And yet, far as
he carried his investigations into the forms, the structure, and the
orthography of the language which he found in his manuscripts of the
fourteenth century, philology was not the primary object of his quest.
He wished to edit his text as well as it was capable of being edited,
and to provide guidance for those who should take up the work when he
was no longer there to direct it. The French text of the Year Books was
full of abbreviations which could not be expanded unless the forms of
the language were accurately ascertained. Maitland therefore applied
himself to learn whatever might be learned about them. The work was
pioneer work, very minute and laborious, but for Maitland a labour of
love. The men who wrote this forgotten and unexplored language were
often clumsy and careless scribes. Their spelling was full of vagaries;
there was no word so short but that they would spell it in several
ways; through neglect of the "e" feminine they lost not entirely but
very largely their sense of gender; they would murder the infinitive;
they coined strange terminations out of misunderstood contractions;
but they were using a living tongue to describe law that was alive;
and if in some ways a fine language degenerated in the current usage
of the English Courts, healthy processes were at work determining the
use of words, processes which it was worth while to watch with some
narrowness, for if thought fashions language, language in turn reacts
upon thought.
"Let it be that the Latin and French were not of a very high order,
still we see at Westminster a cluster of men which deserves more
attention than it receives from our unsympathetic, because legally
uneducated, historians. No, the clergy were not the only learned men
in England, the only cultivated men, the only men of ideas. Vigorous
intellectual effort was to be found outside the monasteries and
universities. These lawyers are worldly men, not men of the sterile
caste; they marry and found families, some of which become as noble as
any in the land; but they are in their way learned, cultivated men,
linguists, logicians, tenacious disputants, true lovers of the nice
case and the moot point. They are gregarious, clubable men, grouping
themselves in hospices, which become schools of law, multiplying
manuscripts, arguing, learning and teaching, the great mediators
between life and logic, a reasoning, reasonable element in the English
nation."
Meanwhile health was failing and gaps were being made in the circle
of his most intimate friends. Henry Sidgwick, the revered master of
philosophy, went first, then Lord Acton, finally, in 1904, Leslie
Stephen. Some words which Maitland spoke of Henry Sidgwick have already
been quoted in this memoir; they are passionate in the intensity
of their affection and regard. Acton was a friend of less ancient
standing, who by his high character and vast learning had conquered
Maitland's unreserved enthusiasm; the loss of Leslie Stephen was
mourned as that of a near relative. Of these deaths one was a possible
and the other an actual cause of some deviation from Maitland's
appointed course of legal work. Upon the vacancy in the Cambridge Chair
of Modern History which occurred in 1902, Maitland was invited by Mr
Balfour to succeed Acton. The appointment would have been applauded
throughout the historical world, but Maitland felt that his health
was too precarious to admit of his undertaking the labours of a new
Chair. Besides, there were the Year Books; there were the illusive
and fascinating subtleties of the _persona ficta_. He would not
lightly abandon the law. _Nolumus leges Angliæ mutare_, he wrote to a
friend, with a slight variation on the classic words of those English
barons who in the reign of Henry III. resisted the introduction of a
foreign usage. The decision was doubtless wise, but the continuity
of Maitland's legal work was not destined to remain unbroken. Leslie
Stephen had expressed a wish that, if any appreciation of him were
published, it should be done by Maitland. "He, as I always feel,
understands me." Such a call could not be neglected, and so the Year
Books were laid aside, or rather the pace was slackened, while Maitland
laboured with loving and scrupulous diligence upon the _Life and
Letters of Leslie Stephen_.
To those who knew Leslie Stephen best the biography has seemed to be
a true and vivid picture of the man; yet the work was undertaken with
many misgivings, and gave cause for much anxiety. In the editing of the
Year Books Maitland was exercising his own familiar craft, and doing
what no other living man could do so well; but the writing of biography
was new ground, and Maitland felt uncertain of his powers. The task
was rendered more difficult by the depth of Maitland's affection for
Stephen, and by his scrupulous anxiety to write down no epithet or
adverb which would have seemed to Stephen himself to be excessive. Then
there were the thousand and one little questions of taste and judgment
which always confront the biographer. Should such a passage be omitted
in deference to so and so's feelings? Will such and such a letter,
interesting though it be to an intimate friend, commend itself to the
chance reader? A man in the full tide of vigour might have shouldered
the labour without a twinge of self-criticism, but Maitland, who was
very ill and full of a most delicate and sensitive modesty, felt the
burden of responsibility. "He is too big for me for one sort of writing
and too dear for another," he wrote to a friend; and only when a
considerable portion of the book had received the approval of relatives
did he begin to experience a sensible measure of relief. The steady
appreciation of Miss Caroline Stephen, and some warm words written by
Lady Ritchie, brought him peculiar pleasure.
The _Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen_ appeared in the autumn of
1906, and reviews were steadily flowing in when the Downing household
began to make preparations for its annual pilgrimage across the sea.
Maitland, who was greatly relieved at the publication of his book,
and at its friendly reception in the press, seemed to have recovered
something of his old buoyancy. He pushed on an edition of Sir Thomas
Smith's _De Republica Anglorum_, which a pupil was undertaking at his
instigation and under his supervision, and renewed his attack upon
the Year Books. For some years past he had been concerned with the
prospect of finding a trained scholar who would be capable of carrying
on the work when he was no longer there to direct it. In a foreign
university a man of Maitland's power would have created a school;
young men from all parts of the country would have clustered round
him to learn paleography and law French, and the elements of social
and legal history, and the zeal of the class would have atoned for any
deficiency in numbers. But the climate of the English University is not
favourable to the production of finished historical technique. We are
an economical race, and since advanced work does not pay in the Tripos,
or in the careers to which the Tripos serves as a portal, it is left to
the casual patronage of amateurs. Maitland thoroughly understood the
practical limitations under which an English professor must work. He
gave courses of lectures which were expressly adapted to the general
needs of the undergraduates, and were attended by all the law students
in the University, but interspersed these general courses with others
of a more special character, designed to interest the real historical
student. Thus, in 1892 and 1894, he held classes for the study of
English Medieval Charters, and this instruction in paleography and
diplomatic was repeated in 1903, 1904 and 1905. In sixty hours spent
over facsimiles Maitland contended that he could turn out a man who
would be able to read medieval documents with fluency and exactitude.
But with two exceptions the contributors to the volumes of the
Selden Society were not drawn from the ranks of Maitland's Cambridge
pupils, and the completion of the fourth volume of the Year Books was
undertaken by a distinguished scholar, who, though he would be the
first to admit that he had learnt much of his craft from Maitland, was
never an academical pupil in the strict sense of the term.
One Cambridge disciple there was, who, under Maitland's guidance,
attained to rare distinction. Miss Mary Bateson was writing essays for
Maitland while he was Reader in English Law, and at that early period
impressed him with the thoroughness and grasp of her knowledge. Under
Maitland's direction Miss Bateson became one of the best medievalists
in England. Her industry rivalled that of her master; her judgments
were sane and level, and in the art of historical editing she acquired
almost all that Maitland could teach her. Articles and volumes flowed
from her pen, all of them good, but best of all the two volumes upon
Borough customs, published by the Selden Society in 1904 and 1906,
and owing much "to the counsel and direction of Professor Maitland."
Then very suddenly, in the late autumn of 1906, Miss Bateson died.
Maitland was already preparing to sail for the Canaries, whither his
wife and elder daughter had preceded him. The loss of Miss Bateson
affected him deeply. He found time to write two short notices for the
Press, speaking of qualities which had impressed him, "the hunger and
thirst for knowledge, the keen delight in the chase, the good-humoured
willingness to admit that the scent was false, the eager desire to get
on with the work, the cheerful resolution to go back and begin again,
the broad good sense and the unaffected modesty," and then embarked for
Southampton. Friends who saw him upon the eve of his departure spoke
of him hopefully: for judged by his own frail standard he seemed to be
well. Then came a telegram announcing his death. On the voyage out he
had developed or contracted pneumonia, and being alone and ill-cared
for, arrived at Las Palmas desperately ill. His wife flew down from the
villa which she had prepared against his coming, but the malady had
obtained too firm a hold, and he died on December 19, 1906, at Quiney's
Hotel. His body lies in the English cemetery at Las Palmas. At the time
of his death he was fifty-six years of age.
He was not without honour in his own generation. In that inclement
December five invitations travelled out to Las Palmas,--from the
University of Oxford that he should deliver the Romanes lecture, and
from the United States of America that he should lecture at the Lowell
Institute, at Harvard, and at the Universities of Columbia and Chicago.
Academic honours had come to him in plenty. Cambridge and Oxford,
Glasgow, Moscow and Cracow gave him their honorary degrees. He was
corresponding member of the Royal Prussian and of the Royal Bavarian
Academies, distinctions rarely conferred upon English scholars, an
honorary Fellow of his old College, Trinity, an honorary Bencher of
Lincoln's Inn, an original Fellow of the British Academy. The newly
established bronze medal of the Harvard Law School was awarded to him
in the last days of his life, and on the news of his death movements
were set on foot at each of the great English Universities to do honour
to his memory. At a public meeting held in the Hall of Trinity College,
Cambridge, on June 1, 1907, and addressed by some of the most eminent
representatives of English learning it was resolved that "a Frederic
William Maitland Memorial Fund should be established for the promotion
of research and instruction in the history of law and legal language
and institutions, and that this should be supplemented by a personal
memorial to be placed in the Squire Library of the University[33]." At
Oxford some students of law and history contributed to form a library
of legal and social history to be called the Maitland Library, and
to be connected with the Corpus Chair of Jurisprudence now held by
Professor Vinogradoff. By the kindness of the Warden and Fellows of All
Souls a room was lent to the Maitland Library in the front quadrangle
of the College, and there the student may find Maitland's own copy of
_Domesday Book_, together with many other volumes which had been in
his possession and which bear the traces of his usage. As a token of
his respect for Maitland's memory, and to further the skilled editing
of a valuable repertory of knowledge, Mr Seebohm has presented to the
Maitland Library his famous manuscript of the Denbigh Cartulary, one of
the cardinal authorities for the history of Welsh land-tenures, and an
edition of this collection of documents, executed by the pupils of the
Corpus professor, will be the most appropriate tribute to Maitland's
example in a University in which he might have been, but was not, an
adopted son.
Lord Acton once spoke of "our three Cambridge historians, Maine,
Lightfoot, Maitland," each a pioneer in his own region of research,
and each a name of significance for universal history. Maitland was
not a Conservative like Maine, or a Churchman like Lightfoot; he was
simply a scientific historian, with a singularly open and candid mind,
and with a detachment almost unique from the prejudice of sect or
party. In politics he would have ranked himself as a Liberal Unionist,
though his mind was far too independent to bear the strain of party
allegiance and led him to differ upon some important questions from the
principles upheld by the Unionist government. Thus he was in favour
of what is called "the secular solution" in education, and tried, but
without success, to think well of the policy which brought about the
South African War. The Protectionist reaction excited his disapproval,
and he joined a Free Trade Committee in Cambridge: but he rarely spoke
of politics, and like all men of the scientific temperament had small
interest in the party game, and no little diffidence as to his power of
reaching solid conclusions upon questions which he had not the leisure
thoroughly to explore. But upon matters which affected the interests of
knowledge and education his views were firm and clear-cut.
His place in the history of English law has been summarized by
Professor Dicey with an authority to which I can make no pretence.
"Maitland's services to law were at least threefold. He demonstrated in
the first place what many lawyers must have suspected, that law could
contribute at least as much to history as history could contribute to
law. Now that the truth of this assertion has been proved it seems a
commonplace to insist upon it. But if one looks at the works of our
best historians, even of so great an historian as Macaulay, who had
rare legal capacity, and who had extensive knowledge from some points
of view of English law, one is astonished to observe how small a part
law was made to play in the development of the English nation, which
had been, above all, a legal-minded nation. The doctrine that law was
an essential part of history needed not only asserting--we could all
probably have done this--but demonstrating. The needed demonstration
has been made by Maitland, and will not be forgotten. Maitland's
second achievement is this: law ought to be, but hitherto in England
has not been, a part of the literature of England. Among Maitland's
predecessors two men living in different ages have done their best to
make law a part of the literature of England. You will forgive me for
commemorating, as in my case is almost a matter of private duty, the
noble effort made by Blackstone to give law its rightful position in
the world of letters. Blackstone failed, not by any weakness of his
own, but because he left no successors. He did as much as a man could
achieve in Blackstone's time. Maitland himself, I believe, shared this
opinion. The next man who took in hand a book somewhat similar to that
undertaken by Blackstone was Sir Henry Maine. He achieved a great
measure of success. He stimulated in a way which it was difficult for
anyone to realise who had not read Maine's _Ancient Law_ when it first
appeared, public interest in law and jurisprudence. He gave to the
English world a new view of the possibilities of interest possessed by
the study of law. But his success is not complete. He did not show,
as did Maitland, that even the most crabbed details of English law
might be made part of English literature. The reason why Maine cannot
in this matter stand on the same level with Maitland is that he did
not possess the qualifications for the third and last of Maitland's
great achievements. No one can say that profound learning was possessed
by either Blackstone or Sir Henry Maine. But Maitland was a learned
historian as well as a learned lawyer. He therefore could and did
demonstrate that extraordinary learning and research have no connection
whatever with dullness and pedantry, and that learning may be combined
with the most philosophic and the profoundest views of law which the
mind of man can form[34]."
This sketch will have been written in vain if it fails to suggest
that the world lost in Maitland not only a great and original scholar
but also a nature of singular charm and beauty. The life of severe
scholarship may, and perhaps often does, dry up the fountains of
sympathy, but this was not the case with Maitland. The current of his
affections ran deep and strong, and so easily was his enthusiasm fired
that he would praise the books of young authors with a delight which
seemed almost unqualified if they happened to contain any real merit.
No one was more entirely free from self-importance or from any desire
to defend, after they had become untenable, positions which he had
once been inclined to maintain. He possessed a gift which is far rarer
than it is generally supposed to be, and is often very imperfectly
possessed by learned men, an intense and disinterested passion for
truth, a passion so pure that he would speak with genuine enthusiasm
of such criticisms of his own work as he judged to be well founded and
to constitute a positive addition to knowledge. His modesty, both in
speech and writing, was so extreme that it might have been put down to
affectation; but it was an integral part of the temper which made him
great in scholarship. He saw the vast hive of science and the infinite
garden of things, and knew how little the most busy life could add to
the store; and so, living always in the company of large projects and
measuring himself by the highest standard of that which is obtainable
in knowledge, he viewed his own acquisitions as a small thing--a
fragment of light won from a shoreless ocean of darkness.
His peculiar genius lay in discovery. He thought for himself, wrote
a pure nervous English of his own, and even in the ordinary converse
of life gave the impression of a being to whom everything was fresh
and alive. His style was very characteristic of his vivid and elastic
mind, ranging as it did from grave eloquence to colloquial fun, and
using only the simplest vocabulary to produce its effects. Conscious
theory or method of style he neither claimed nor cared to possess;
he wrote as the spirit moved him, finding with astonishing ease the
vestment most appropriate to his thought, and composing with such
fluency that his manuscript went to press almost free of erasures.
The literary and artistic conventions of the hour did not appeal to
him. He never went to picture galleries; in later life he seldom read
poetry, though as a boy he had been fond of it; and he would profess
to be unable to distinguish a good sonnet when he saw one. Knowing
the thing which he could do best, and judging that it was worthy of a
life, he stripped himself of all superfluous tastes and inclinations
that his whole time and strength might be dedicated to the work. Even
music had to give way. And yet, though he laboured under the spur of a
most exacting conscience and with every discouragement which illness
and harrowing physical pain could oppose, it was with a certain blithe
alacrity, as if work, however protracted and monotonous, was always
a delightful pastime. He would sit in an armchair with a pipe in his
mouth and some ponderous folio propped against his knees, steadily
reading and smoking far into the night, thinking closely, taking no
note, but apparently retaining everything. For a man who wrote and
taught so much his knowledge was amazing both in range and accuracy;
but his panoply might have been of gossamer so lightly did he bear it,
and those who saw him a few times only may remember him chiefly for
his irrepressible gift of humour, or for some external features, the
fine steady brown eye, the rich flexible voice, the pale clear cut face
seamed with innumerable lines, which lit up so quickly in the play of
talk. Mr S. H. Butcher, who was in the same year at Cambridge and of
the same college, has spoken the mind of those who knew him best. "When
they think of him they recall, in the first instance, the delightful
companion, the friend who had himself the genius of friendship. They
think of his humour, overflowing from his talk and his speeches into
what seems to many the driest regions of legal or antiquarian learning,
and they recall his modesty, his quiet charm and his essential courtesy
of soul[35]." And there was withal that high spiritual power of
abnegation and of purpose in which the lover of hard won truth attains
to his beatitude. _Res severa est verum gaudium._