2IO
THE GREEN BAG
his lectures on the history of English law had been extended so as to include the twelfth as well as the thirteenth century, and con centrated chiefly upon tenure. He was working backward from Bracton to Glanvill. He added further a course of lectures on the origin of feudalism in England, the substance of which is no doubt preserved in his Domesday Book and Beyond, and began that instruction in paleography to which allusion has already been made. On the legal side he gave a course of lectures on equity with special reference to trusts, which seems, to judge from its frequent repetition in later years, to have been a fav orite of his. In 1893 the lectures on the history of English law had been still further subdivided and defined. In one term it was status and jurisdiction, in another land laws, and in another a general sketch of Eng lish legal history. The great book was fast taking form and shape. The instruction in equity and paleography continued and the year is further marked by two publications, the Records of the Parliament at Westminster in 1305, a model of editorial care and skill with an invaluable introduction, treating of the relation of the council, the courts, and the parliament, and parliamentary proced ure, and a brilliant introduction to Mr. Whittaker's edition of the Mirror of Jus tices for the Selden Society. In 1894 Maitland must have been largely occupied in passing the History of English Law through the press. Certainly he gave no new lec tures, although he did produce, for the Selden Society, that volume on Bracton and Azo which may be regarded as having definitely settled the vexed question of Bracton's debt to the Roman Law, in the sense that the substance of Bracton's book is English. The year 1895 is in some sort the turning point in Maitland's intellectual career. The great historical work was done. Painfully and laboriously he had hewn and prepared the materials and trained others to do the same. But he had never neglected those studies and interests which quali
fied him so preeminently to plan and con struct the great edifice which will long stand as a monument to his genius. The History of English Law in its form and its substance exemplifies nearly all of Maitland's distin guishing qualities. It is the work of a philos opher and a jurist familiar with the thinking and learning of continental schools; but it is the work too of a critic subtle and erudite, of the documents upon which is based all knowledge of the subject; and finally it is the work of a man of letters, an artist of no mean order. We are just beginning to measure the effect which this book has pro duced upon the method and the substance of historical teaching. What its effect may have been upon the teaching of law I can not tell. But its great lesson of the vital connection of law and history can scarcely fail in the long run to stamp itself upon lawyers as it has done and is still doing upon historians. This closes the first period of Maitland's intellectual activity. A second period be tween 1895 and 1903 is transitional in char acter. There was much historical work remaining to do, for the whole abundant harvest of those earlier years of study and research could not be garnered even into a grange so commodius as the two stately volumes of the History of English Law. Accordingly two more volumes were to come. Whether he would have continued his historical studies when these were com pleted cannot be known. But his health failed, and from the closing year of the century he worked as a man who knows that his time is short, and sees the magni tude of the task remaining to be done. When he took the Year-Books in hand, his whole interest was concentrated upon the work of editing them, and in later years he would turn almost fretfully from ques tions connected with his earlier historical work. The preparation for the History of English Law had involved what he himself has described as an incursion into a region
