FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND that was unfamiliar to him, that of ecclesi astical jurisprudence. The first-fruits of these studies consisted in a course of lec tures on the elementary history of canon law, delivered in the Michaelmas Term of 1895. These are not to be confused with his special study of the canon law in the church of England of which I shall speak presently. I am informed by a friend, who had the great advantage of hearing these lectures, that they treated the whole of the growth and formation of the Corpus Juris Canonici, and that they were elementary only in so far as they were addressed to a class — small, alas! — of beginners. In 1896 Maitland was lecturing on equity and the English village community, and the next year he published Domesday Book and Beyond, a work which for historical stu dents is as important as the History of English Law. Indeed, it grew out of, and supplements that book. Its publication marks a long step forward in the discussion of the question of the origins and founda tions of society, which has been so bitterly disputed since the middle of the last cen tury. If all the theories which Maitland advanced in it have not been able to endure the fire of criticism, they have none the less served a valuable purpose. In 1898 Mait land lectured on equity, and repeated under the title, of agrarian Cambridge the sub stance of his lectures delivered the year before on the Ford foundation at Oxford. These he published under the title Town ship and Borough, and they form an im portant contribution to a subject both phil osophical and legal, which always exercised an irresistible fascination over him — the growth of the corporation. During the years that remained to him he returned to this again and again, both in teaching and writing. In this same year, 1898, he pub lished a volume, small in bulk but great in power, entitled Canon Law in the Church of England. In this he taught, indeed I may say he established, the proposition that down to the breach with Rome the English
211
church was as much bound by the law of the universal church as any other branch of that organization. Apparently an obvious truth, but in reality less simple than it appears. The theory of the matter that then held the field had been advanced by Stubbs in 1883 in the Report of the Com mission on Ecclesiastical Courts and after ward expounded in his Oxford lectures. Roughly stated it was to the effect that the English church was only bound by so much of the canon law as had been accepted and ratified in English councils, and that Lyndwood's Provinciate was a sort of special corpus of English canon law. This view Maitland traversed directly, and if you have regard only to the theory of the canonists, he was no doubt right; at any rate his case was a strong one. The implications of either position are of course very far reach ing.; but an unlucky high churchman, whose zeal exceeded his learning, found to his cost that Maitland was not unable to defend himself. He jestingly described his oppo nents in this dispute as representing the Anglican church as wholly Protestant before the Reformation and wholly Catholic ever since. But it is likely that, as far as the purely legal question goes, the last word has not been said, and cannot be, until we know more than we do at present of what went on in the courts christian. In 1899 his health broke down completely, and there was little of teaching or writing. But he employed his enforced leisure in translating part of one of the books that had most influenced his thinking. The chapter of Gierke's Gcnossenschaftsrecht, which in 1900 appeared in English under the title, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, is a very substantial contribution to political philosophy as well as to law. Maitland's part in this work was by no means confined to that of translator, for he added a brilliant essay dealing with the origin and theory of the corporation and its relation to the state. His views on this subject are well known, less so perhaps is his jesting remark that
