It is strange to think that Maitland should have joined the centenarians. His genius has always seemed to lie in just those qualities of mind and spirit that should protect a man from the centenary-mongers, Wisden-watchers, and monumental masons of the memory. Yet, so it is. Maitland was born a century ago, and the word has gone round, and the plums of Fisher's little Life of 1910 have been pulled out and offered to us as substitutes for thinking about Maitland in 1950. Bletchley Junction threatens to become a terminus.

The perspective is still too short for anything like a final appraisal of the man and his work, but something more might already be attempted than the recitation of examples of his notorious wit or the affixing of a few unexamined labels. The wit and the beaux yeux can be taken for granted. That he was a wholly delightful human being could be adduced from almost any single page of his prose, for in his case, as in few others, the style was verily the man. The customary labels can safely be left to writers in the little magazines that specialize in the award of alphas and betas, majors and minors, to their betters. What is wanted is a series of documented inquiries into Maitland's place in the history of history, in order to see him in the progress of studies. What is attempted here is a prolegomena to such inquiries: an assessment of the kind of mind that Maitland brought to the problems of history.

Maitland, we have to remind ourselves, was born in the hey-day of Lord Palmerston and the Great Exhibition; he was eighteen when Mr Gladstone formed his first Administration; he grew up with Essays and Reviews, the Origin of Species, and In Memoriam. When he died at Quiney's Hotel in Las Palmas, a few days before Christmas 1906, the great Liberal victory seemed to have set the seal on the forward-looking forces of Edwardian England; and although prophetic minds—Maitland's among them—had seen in the South African War the ghastly shape of things to come, the Hundred Years' Peace still hung over Europe. The horse-trams still rumbled along King's Parade, beer was tuppence a pint and tobacco fourpence an ounce, and there were still young women to carry coals and do the washing-up at £30 a year for married dons. England, and most of all Cambridge, was still a good place for a scholar and a gentleman, although Maitland, who was both, had had to winter in the Canaries since 1898. Cycling up and down the hills of Las Palmas to the derision of the chiquillos, or stretched out on a chaise-lounge with a straw-hat and a pipe copying Year Books, while Mrs. Maitland haggled over vegetables at the house-door in torrential Spanish, he nevertheless found life in exile 'downright wickedly pleasant'. That, after all, is how we see him: the Edwardian don with the quiff, the cut-away starched collar, the guardsman's moustache, and the eyes of an invalid-poet. Something of the bright-eyed sadness of R. L. Stevenson, something of the military bearing of Elgar; the brave and fragile English man of letters, condemned to a premature death. Some one had once predicted that he would turn out 'a kind of philosophic Charles Lamb'.

Maitland left off being Charles Lamb while he was still up at Trinity. Lamb went out with the piano, the racing-oar and the cinder-track. There came in the tireless pioneer of a certain kind of scholarship: the man who was to do for legal history what his grandfather, Samuel Roffey Maitland, had done 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'. Thus F. W. Maitland defined the achievement of Samuel Roffey in 1891, and in so doing he was defining his own task as he saw it. He was to write books which were to render impossible a whole class of existing books, and like Samuel Roffey, he was to write them for the few: those few who would be, as he put it, 'just the next generation of historians …' What he admired about S. R. M., more even than his style and his matter, was his method: his rigorous application of the canons of evidence. The ideal of scholarship upheld by S. R. M. had been confirmed for his grandson by his beloved master at Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick: 'An unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a model of perfect work.' No dogma, no indoctrination, no 'school'; but the freest and boldest thought set forth with the utmost candour, sobriety and circumspection; the maximum of ascertainable and communicable truth attended with all those reservations and qualifications, exceptions and distinctions, 'which suggest themselves to a subtle and powerful mind'. Possessed of such an ideal of scholarship, and an almost virgin field of discovery, 'he did' (to apply F. W. M.'s words on S. R. M. to F. W. M. once more) 'what was wanted just at the moment when it was wanted, and so has a distinct place in the history of history in England'.

That is where F. W. Maitland's place is, and must be; not in the calendar of 'Great Historians', but in the history of history. It will always be useless to advise people to 'read Maitland' as one advises them to 'read Gibbon' or to 'read Macaulay'. It is useless to pretend that anyone but a scholar, or at least a person of scholarly habits and intention, is ever going to read Maitland's works as they will sit down and read Gibbon's Decline and Fall or Macaulay's History of England. Mr G. M. Young's famous reference to the evening when he took down Domesday Book and Beyond 'and read, and read, till the owl in the fir-tree began audibly to wonder why the lamp was still burning, and the little breezes that stray down the dene from Wansdyke turned chilly, and the dawn came …' is a tribute to the scholarly tastes of Mr Young rather than a recommendation of Maitland as a popular spell-binder. For one thing, there can hardly be a Collected Edition, and there will certainly never be a 'Penguin'. He has nothing to say to the Common Reader who requires his history to be generalized into broad outlines and movements, and in some sense relevant to what he calls 'the contemporary situation'. He had not very much to say even to the world that attends Inaugurals. His own Inaugural, as Downing Professor of the Laws of England, was largely devoted to pointing out the spadework awaiting the modest pioneer of English legal history, in readiness for 'the great man when he comes …' When, at the death of Lord Acton, Arthur Balfour offered him the Regius Chair at Cambridge, he declined not only because he was a sick man but because he would have been expected to address himself to the World at Large, and he doubted very much whether he 'had anything to say to the W. at L.' He was relieved to have escaped the crowds that came to hear Bury. 'I don't think that I should like full houses and the limelight. So I go back to the Year Books. Really, they are astonishing.… '

He knew that he was a pioneer, that he was finding a way into a largely unexplored territory, making use of a whole world of new material, and that his work must necessarily be provisional, exploratory, even (for a great part) editorial. With the modesty and devotion of the pioneer, he was content to be the servant of the great historian of the future. It is typical that almost the last and greatest of his works should have been to edit and translate the Year Books of Edward II, with full apparatus criticus and a priceless Anglo-French Grammar and Syntax. 'Someday' he observed, 'they will return to life once more at the touch of a great historian.' He was like a man who comes upon a mountain, a mine, or a dark continent. He was constantly pointing to the vast heap, the depths, or the darkness of the 'beyond', and calling upon the pioneers to join him; pulling out exciting specimens of ore and cracking open their veins with the neatest of scholastic hammers; even inventing a grammar and syntax for the lingo of the natives. And the great trek into the beyond had begun in a hansom-cab.

Not Gibbon's immortal moment among the ruins of the Capitol will outlive Maitland's Sunday morning in the Parks at Oxford, when, sprawling on the grass beside Paul Vinogradoff, he heard for the first time of the almost virgin treasures of the Public Record Office awaiting the studious artisan of English medieval history. Not the vesper-hymns of barefooted friars, but the Sabbath bells of Protestant North Oxford, and a pupil of Mommsen wagging his little beard and talking the queer English he had picked up from a study of the Bible and the Pink 'Un. A Sunday tramp—that pedestrian delight of Victorian dons—a lounge in a Park—and, next day, a cab-ride from Paddington: the shade of Gibbon shudders and turns pale. But this is Sunday, May 11th, 1884. Not Rome, but the Gothic North, awaits its historian. It waited just twenty-four hours. On Monday afternoon, Maitland was in the Record Office transcribing the earliest Plea-roll of the County of Gloucester. By the end of the year, Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester was in print—a small, uncomely volume, but a landmark in the history of history. It was dedicated to Paul Vinogradoff. Another man might have been 'interested' by Vinogradoff's talk of treasure. Another man might have gone to see—in a fortnight, or in six months, or when he had time. Maitland went the next day. He went, not because he was merely interested, or curious, or speculative, but because his imagination had caught fire. He had seen the very life of a vanished age peep at him from a pile of parchment. 'I often think' he was to write to Vinogradoff, when he was Downing Professor of the Laws of England, 'what an extraordinary piece of luck for me it was that you and I met upon a "Sunday Tramp". That day determined the rest of my life.'

But the passion, the potentiality, was there long before the words of Vinogradoff awakened it. The Plea-rolls of the County of Gloucester found Maitland in a much more important sense than he found them. Coleridge used to say that 'in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together'. The comparison is not irreverent if, as Coleridge believed, the imagination is the creative principle in man, the faculty by which he shares in the divine creativity. Whether the imagination is awakened by the history of the House of Israel or by the history of the County of Gloucester may be mightily important to a theologian, but the Divine has a habit of working in ways that are hidden from divines. 'If it be but luck that sends us to Gloucester' Maitland observed, 'still the lot has fallen to us in a fair ground … Deus in medio ejus; non commovebitur.' In Maitland, the ground for visitation was well prepared. He was no rootless intellectual ready to feel vague emotions about 'the past'. He had history in his blood, and he had a patrimony in a beloved soil. All the best history begins as local history, and Maitland knew and loved the county of Gloucester. He belonged to the Cotswold country and 'Squire Maitland's lands'. The grey stone manor-house of Brookthrope looked out to the Malvern Hills where on another May morning, five hundred years before Maitland's vision in the Oxford Parks, William Langland too had seen a Fair Field Full of Folk. For that, after all, is what Maitland saw in 1884 in the plea-rolls of 1221. 'A picture' he called his book, 'or rather, since little imaginative art went to its making, a photograph of English life as it was early in the thirteenth century … What is visible in the foreground is crime, and crime of a vulgar kind—murder and rape and robbery. This would be worth seeing 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 …' And there they all are, the vanished folk: sheriffs and famous men, 'a sufficiency of abbots and priors … the great landowning families.. a crowd of men neither rich nor famous … reeves, smiths, millers, carpenters in abundance… pledges, witnesses, finders of dead bodies, suspected persons, and so forth… a section of the body politic …' Such a view, after all, owes more to the imagination than Maitland, in his modesty, was prepared to admit.

The quality of Maitland's imagination should not be misunderstood. It was intensely concrete; or, one should rather say, it was an imagination for the concrete. It had nothing of the vague, otherseeking quality of the romantic. It was neither elegiac, nor nostalgic, nor escapist. He did not go in search of the past as something strange, mysterious, different, or remote. It was not a matter of going to discover or experience something 'there'—something 'past' in the sense of dead, cut off, finished; something that once was and that is no longer; something the more attractive just because it was once and is no longer. Nor was he in search of the 'practical past'—the past that explains or justifies or condemns the present, although he could hardly have been a historian at all without being aware of the relevance of the past in the world of present experience. Of course the past 'led up to' the present, in the broad sense that there must always be, conventionally, a before and after in any temporal view of things. History as process was not invalidated for him by a philosophy of experience; indeed, he was so little a philosopher explicite that he could assume, with the happy ignorance of the born historian, the validity of a philosophy of history as the story of the progressive reason of mankind. I say 'assume' because his work is shot through and through with the happy gleams of a progressive rationality that he hardly ever adumbrated. Far too sensitive to the enormous complexity of things to accept the crudities of historical causation as they appear in the work of the great liberal-rationalist tradition to which he nevertheless belonged, he yet saw the human race under the order of a broadly progressive rationality. 'Towards definition' might have been his motto; with a never-failing note of caution against simplicity.

That is where the concrete nature of his imagination made Maitland the greatest of his line. 'The history of law must be the history of ideas.' Yes, but ideas exist in the minds of men, and ideas are about things (pace the philosopher), and the main thing they are about is money, or money's worth—notably, in land. Men had talked for long enough about the military and political character of feudalism, and about the 'feudal system' as a system of law and obligation. Maitland thought it was time to talk about it in terms of economics, too—in terms of landed property, its uses, and its unequal distribution. 'There seems to me a tendency to lay too much stress on the military and political, too little on the economic side of feudalism.' Legal ideas do not exist in their own right but as the vesture of the substantial, and it was the substantial form beneath the vesture that Maitland watched in its every posture and its endless flexibility… And more than that. He saw always the specific example of the substantial. It is right to have our 'idea of a feudal state'. But it is much more right to attend to 'the concrete actual realities to which it answers, the Germany, France, England of different centuries …' Not the generality of the General Eyre, which might have been mistaken for a Governor of Jamaica, but the Eyre held before the King's Justices at Gloucester in the year of Grace, A.D. 1221, was what interested him. Nor is it even 'the King's Justices' that we see, but the Abbot of Reading, Simon, and the Abbot of Evesham, Randolf, and—most famous of all—Martin Pateshull—'so strong, so sedulous, that he wears out all his fellows … for every day he begins work at sunrise and does not stop until nightfall… The amount of hard riding, let alone justice, that he had done is almost beyond belief'. And the places: not the Hundreds, Towns and Manors of the County of Gloucester, but Campden and Slaughter, Grumbaldsash and Wick. Maitland knew where they were: he had gone there to find them. 'Many questions are solved by walking. Beati omnes qui ambulant.' That was his way in his first book. It was his way in his last—the great edition of the Year Books of Edward II. 'What they desired'—the lawyers of the thirteenth century, and Maitland of the nineteenth—'was the debate with the lifeblood in it … They wanted to remember what really fell from Bereford, C. J., his proverbs, his sarcasms: how he emphasized a rule of law by Noun Dieu or Par Seint Pierel It is almost a symbol of Maitland's method that Edith of Wackford came into Court with the disputed pig in her arms. The pig is always there, in Maitland's arms. One can almost hear its individual grunt. But, unlike any pig of Carlyle (his only rival in concrete particularity), one only hears it once.

Now this attachment to the concrete, as we have it in Maitland, must be carefully distinguished from 'the human touch' or the 'eye for the telling detail' by which the purveyors of 'social history' sell their wares. Maitland never employs the concrete and living instance simply because it is picturesque or strange. The taste for what Coleridge stigmatized as 'the contingent and the transitory' must always be part of the make-up of a historian, and mere vulgar curiosity about what he mistakenly calls 'other times' plays a greater part among his motives and incentives than he is sometimes willing to admit. Without something of the antiquarian to weight his feet he will be the more likely to perish among the -isms and -ologies of the conceptualists. But the desire to get past Carlyle's imaginary 'Time-curtains' and to lay hands on the 'genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651', unless it is controlled by a strong sense of that totality of human experience which must inform and suffuse our every experience of particularity, will lead only to a nostalgic and fruitless trifling with the superficies of history. This is the ever-present danger which attends much that goes by the equivocal name of 'social history', and Maitland was preserved from its menace not only by his legal training but by his conscious intentions. He was, by both profession and bent, a dealer in the 'public'. Ideas, to him, are never private ideas, always institutional. Crime, unlike sin, is a public concern, and it is controlled not by conscience but by institutions. Greed and jealousy, lust and beer, he observes, are monotonous; the tale requires to be diversified by the activity of officials and institutions in order to become the stuff of history. Hence the priceless miniature biographies of Gerard of Athee and Engelard of Cigone, King John's rascally but highly competent Sheriffs of Gloucestershire. Their exactions diversify the tale of common crime, and 'mere social history is enlivened by a touch of politics'. The tiny gust of sarcasm contained in such a phrase says volumes for Maitland's attitude to any such definition of social history as 'History with the politics left out'.

Maitland's power of realizing the concrete in its multitudinous variety is matched only by his power of persuading the reader that multiformity is not a synonym for chaos, but is the very semblance of life as he knows it in its ultimate rationality. Neither in nature nor in history (to make a distinction without division) is seeming chaos to be subdued by the imposition of law. It is to be subdued only by our apprehension of the law which subsists within them. Maitland was content with his partial glimpsing of the inner logic of things. Everywhere we find him patiently assisting its appearance. Of course, he will say, there is 'progress', in the sense of an endless process of individuation, but the moral being sometimes crawls, sometimes runs, or for a time it doubles on its tracks. 'No doubt, from one point of view, namely that of universal history', he observed, of the Dark Ages, 'we do see confusion and retrogression … Lines that have been traced with precision are smudged out, and then must be traced once more.' When the barbarian hordes invade a Roman province, we shall say—if we take a narrower view—that 'their legal thought gradually goes to the bad, and loses distinctions which it has once apprehended'. The endless process of education of the human spirit, which is history, may seem to be halted, but it never ceases. 'In course of time men will evolve formulas which will aptly fit their thought.' The barbarians take what they need of their inheritance and use it as they will. 'This is as it should be. Men are learning to say what they really mean.' Again, of the large process known as the feudalizing of Europe, it is possible—from the narrow view of this place and that—to regard it as 'a disease of the body politic' producing 'phenomena which come of evil and make for evil'. But in the widest sense, looking at several centuries of time, 'feudalism will appear to us as a natural and even a necessary stage in our history'. It will mean the civilization of an epoch, a moving, changing form of society; and the England of the eleventh century will show itself to be nearer to the England of the nineteenth, when compared to the England of the seventh century—by just four hundred years. That Maitland had to say this in 1897, and that we no longer need to have it said to us, is one measure of the difference that he made to our thinking.

History, then, for Maitland, is not a straight line, not a chain of cause and effect, least of all a triumphal procession from darkness into light. It is the image of the life of nature itself: a web in which every thread is connected with every other. So are those other images of nature, The Ancient Mariner and the Fifth Symphony. It is how the poet or the musician is more habituated to see the world than are most historians: even as Thomas Hardy saw it—a vast web which quivers in every part when one part is shaken, 'like a spider's web if touched'. It is not how Michelet or Mill, Macaulay or Maine, see it. Sometimes it seems, indeed, as if the nature of history has always been best known to those who do not write it. Maitland, the dissenter from all churches who restored the ecumenical law of Rome at the expense of Ecclesia Anglicana; the Liberal who could criticize the Liberalism of 1884 on behalf of the Shallows and the Silences of real life; the rationalist who spent his life in trying to get under the skin of the Ages of Faith; this Maitland is the great exception, and it was his unique combination of scientific scholarship with the intuitive knowledge of a great artist that made him the finest historical intelligence that the English-speaking world has produced. Perhaps his passion for music, which was second only to his passion for the law, had something to do with it. He read a score with the same facility and delight with which he read the Year Books. The same exercise of the mind was involved in both; the immediate apprehension of inner logic and organic wholeness. He did not find the principle of unity in Providence, or a Great Mathematician, or the Life Force, or even a Divine Lord Chancellor. The most that he would allow himself was a reference, untroubled by Hegelian ramifications, to the progressive rationality of mind. One feels that he was, of all historians, the nearest to knowing what history is, and this because he never tried to impose a philosophy upon it but was content to experience it.

So Maitland gives us the seamless web. It was he who, in the first sentence of the History of English Law, gave us the very similitude. 'Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web … The web must be rent; but, as we rend it, we may watch the whence and whither of a few of the several and ravelling threads which have been making a pattern too large for any man's eye.' The thread which he chose to watch—or, as Henry James would say, his 'pattern in the carpet'—was that of the law, the evolution of the ideas by which men have juridically regulated their relationships to each other in face of a common environment. The history of the law was not the whole of history, but it was, to Maitland, the formal construction which showed the changing life of mankind most immediately and at its most vital moments. The best way to get to know a nation, he once said, is to go and watch a murder trial in its courts. 'The great mediators between life and logic' he found not in a people's philosophers, or priests, or scientists, but in its practising lawyers. Bracton's book on the laws of England marked and made 'a critical moment in the history of English law, and therefore in the essential history of the English people'. The Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester should be welcome 'not only to some students of English law, but also… to some students of English history'. He inserted the clause: 'if such a distinction be maintainable'—and it is evident that he thought it was not. By following this thread, of all others, Maitland did not pretend that men would be able to see the whole pattern of history: that was too large for any man's eye. But he did think that it would bring us nearest to all the rest, providing that we remember always that the law is the vesture of the non-legal forces at work in society. The history of the law should lead us to look beyond the sphere of the legal, to the exigencies which government's physical livelihood, to the mysterious impingements of human personalities, and to the complex interplay of the game of politics. Maitland was not indulging in the cobbler's propaganda on behalf of leather. In fact, he was always emphasizing how many other things than a good lawyer a good historian of the law must be. He emphasized it best by being those things himself.

Maitland may be said to have strengthened the tradition by which the History of England, as taught at our Universities, has been for so long equated with Constitutional History. That tradition still flourishes, despite attempts to replace it with undifferentiated English History. It is a good tradition, and has served us well. Here is something for which England is famous—her unique contribution to civilized living. Not only is it right and proper that Englishmen should be trained to understand this, their heritage, but the very process of training them to understand it involves a discipline unrivalled outside the Classics and Mathematics. Maitland's name is indissolubly connected not only with this tradition of studies. It is even more intimately connected with the 'legalistic' character of English Constitutional History as it is taught. His Lectures on Constitutional History remain at the head of the Reading List for the subject endorsed by the Faculty at Cambridge. Hallam and Dicey, Holdsworth and Jennings, they are there, too. And this is right and proper. English Constitutional History has not only been largely written by lawyers: it has largely been made by them. Judges, barristers, inns of court and law schools have been the champions and breeding grounds of those liberties which the Constitution exists to defend and vindicate. It was very well, and very natural, for Jeremy Bentham to talk one hundred and fifty years ago of 'Judge and Co.' as public enemy number one. It was fortunate for us that the inns bred Bentham as well as Burke. As Maitland was fond of saying, 'Law Schools make tough law'—tough enough for every enemy of liberty down to the High Court of Chancery itself. The question now is whether that toughness will prove sufficient to meet the challenge of administrative tyranny in the name of 'the sovereign people'. As long as those who have charge of our destinies are bred in the 'legalistic' tradition of our Constitution and its history, the danger facing us will at least be under surveillance. It is right that the rivals of that tradition—economists, sociologists, psychologists, and the rest—should stake their claims, and make them good, for inclusion in the general story. But it is also right for them to remember that, so long as the sword sleeps in our civil life, the field of battle where the great issues are fought must ever be where it has ever been—the ancient purlieus of litigation.

In so far as the legalistic tradition in our constitutional history owes anything to Maitland, it owes a broader and deeper conception of what such terms as 'law' and 'constitutional history' ought to contain. Maitland taught us what Savigny taught him, and what his plunge into Plearolls, Bracton, and the Year Books confirmed in enthralling detail: that law is the product of social needs, a rational concept of human relationships arising from the total history of a people. He taught us, again, that the history of a people lies within the greater framework of a civilization. He knew and loved the unique characteristics of England as a developing society within medieval Europe. He cherished its differences and devoted some of his subtlest pages to their analysis. But he was always aware, and his reader is always made aware, of a wider framework of reference. The first edition of the History of Engish Law began with the Saxons; the second edition began with Rome. That wonderful opening chapter, added in 1898, was the work of Maitland alone, and it lifts the whole work on to the plane, if not of the universal, at least into the orbit of metropolitan Europe. Again, take the opening passage of his chapter on the Anglican Church Settlement and Scotland, in the second volume of the Cambridge Modern History. His concern is with a small rough spot on the rim of sixteenth-century Europe. He is to show us the Scotland of Melville and Knox. But he takes his stand first at Rome, the central point of the Counter-Reformation, and thence looks outwards to 'what was shaping itself in the northern seas'. Only then, when we have seen 'two small Catholic powers traditionally at war with each other, the one a satellite of the Habsburg luminary, the other a satellite of France' does he carry us down in a swoop upon his subject proper—'that wonderful scene, the Scotland of Mary Stuart and John Knox … such glorious tragedy … such modern history', the scene where 'the fate of the Protestant Reformation was being decided, and the creed of unborn millions in undiscovered lands was being determined'. It is history in the making that we are shown. We are not told what was done, and why. We are shown it in the doing.

A reading of Maitland's chapter in the Cambridge Modern History leaves no doubt in one's mind that he would have succeeded brilliantly as a historian of the 'extended' subject—as a so-called 'narrative historian' who takes for his subject the total history of a people or a civilization, say The History of England, or The History of Europe. Nor can there be any doubt that he believed such work was still possible and desirable. What he chiefly admired in the work of his master, Stubbs, was 'the immense scope of the book … the enormous mass of material that is being used, and the ease with which this immense weight is moved and controlled … the excellent and (to the best of my belief) highly original plan which by alternating "analytical" and "annalistic" chapters weaves a web so stout that it would do credit to the roaring loom of time.' Polyglot history—although he participated in it—made him wonder. 'It will be a very strange book, that History of ours', he wrote, when he had sent off his contribution to Lord Acton's miscellany. He thought that if contributors failed, and Lord Acton had to write all twelve volumes himself (which he could have done without turning a hair) it might not be a matter of the worst coming to the worst but of the best coming to the best. And finally, Maitland always thought of himself as a pioneer whose work might help to make possible 'the great historian of the future'. Even that masterpiece of monographic art, Domesday Book and Beyond, was a 'provisional answer' which could be 'forgotten' when Paul Vinogradoff's Villeinage in England should appear; while the monumental History of English Law is described in the Introduction as concerned more with the advancement of knowledge than with symmetry of design. 'The time for an artistically balanced picture of English medieval law will come: it has not come yet.'

Maitland's work is peppered with these anticipatory and suspensory references. 'The time will come … The sun will rise, not a doubt of it … The great historian of the future … He that should come … the great man for the great book …' Nearly half a century has passed since Maitland died, and the time has not come, and the great historian of synthesis is still to seek. History is deeper than ever in the morass of monographs, learned articles, revisions, and wait-a-bits. The University student is fed increasingly on Mr X's article on this, and Mr Z's excursus on that. Paradoxically enough, it is a situation to which Maitland himself contributed more than most. An age which has outlived his liberal-rationalist confidence in the progressive reason, his attachment to the objective pursuit of truth, and his happy faith in the arrival of another master of history on the grand scale, has sought increasingly to shuffle off its larger responsibilities by an obsessive concern with quantitative inquiries and provisional judgments. His warnings against over-simplification and hasty dogmatism have run to seed. What he learnt from Henry Sidgwick in the way of intellectual caution and qualification has become a disease. Maitland himself observed the symptoms. Unless a man were Sidgwick himself, he would say, 'there does seem a chance that while he is choosing, he may fall a prey to the insidious disease that is called "scholar's paralysis".' Can anyone doubt that that is what we have come to, fifty years after? To open almost any historical monograph of the mid-twentieth century is like opening a door upon a quicksand.

The fact is that Maitland was living and thinking in the sunset of the tradition of 'general history'—the tradition that began properly with Hume and Gibbon and bids fair to end with Trevelyan. He was very nearly the last of that great Liberal intelligentsia (the horrid word is inescapable) which slowly but surely substituted History for the Classics as the central discipline of a humane education. His brother-in-law, Herbert Fisher, was to write what will probably prove to be the last one-man History of Europe, of any standing, a work that confesses its author's inability to discover any pattern in historical phenomena, and, at its worst, evokes the last false echo of the Gibbonic sonorities. 'What these gentlemen need,' Karl Marx was wont to remark of the deviationists, 'is philosophy'. It is what historians need, now. It is what Maitland had, implicitly in heart and spirit, if not explicitly on tongue and pen, and what made his work, monographical as it had necessarily to be at the stage of historical studies in which he worked, the very image of life. The methods of the master are not enough. The lesson of the master has still to be learnt. Which means that Maitland's successor can only be another Maitland, and even one Maitland in a century is perhaps more than we have a right to expect.