Frederic William Maitland

Although this book was envisaged as a joint venture and bears the name of both Pollock and Maitland, it is substantially the work of Maitland. It was recognised at once as a masterpiece and has since been accepted as one of the great histories in the English language. In Maitland's lifetime Acton pronounced him the ablest historian in England. Plucknett said that 'everything he wrote exercises a deep fascination and a personal attraction'. To Sir Maurice Powicke he was 'one of the immortals'. Lord Annan, in the preface to his Leslie Stephen, called him 'perhaps the greatest of all professional historians'. To read The History of English Law, even many years after Maitland's death, is to feel at once the touch of a master. That touch could only be weakened by editing, so the present issue is a reprint of the second edition but with an introductory essay and a select bibliography by S. F. C. Milsom, Professor of Legal History in the University of London.

The forms of action are a part of the structure upon which rests the whole common law of England and, though we may have buried them, they still, as Maitland says, rule us from their graves. The following extract is taken from the editors' preface: 'The evasion of the burden of archaic procedure and of such barbaric tests of truth as battle, ordeal and wager of law, by the development of new forms and new law out of criminal or quasi criminal procedure and the inquest of neighbour-witnesses has never been described with this truth and clearness. He makes plain a great chapter of legal history which the learners and even the lawyers of today have almost abandoned in despair. The text of the chief writs is given after the lectures …'

'Constitutional history should, to my mind, be a history not of parties but of institutions, not of struggles but of results …' F. W. Maitland's remarkable course of lectures provides the basic framework of English constitutional history in a brief, but original, scholarly and very readable form. His method is to take five crucial periods and to present in each a panoramic view of the processes of law and government; his attention is always fixed on the constitution as a growing fabric, as something devised and employed by live human beings. And in this work, as in all he subsequently wrote, Maitland shows a rare combination of high speculative power with exact knowledge of detail.