Frederick W. Maitland

Frederic William Maitland
Portrait of Frederic William Maitland by Beatrice Lock, 1906
Born	(1850-05-28)28 May 1850 London
Died	19 December 1906(1906-12-19) (aged 56) Gran Canaria
Occupation	Historian, Jurist
Nationality	English
Notable works	The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I The Constitutional History Of England
Spouse	Florence Henrietta Fisher
Children	Ermengard, Fredegond
Signature

The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I

Frederic William Maitland, FBA (28 May 1850 – 19 December 1906) was an English historian and lawyer who is generally regarded as the modern father of English legal history.

Maitland was born at 53 Guilford Street, London, the only son of John Gorham Maitland (1818–1863) and of Emma, daughter of John Frederic Daniell. His grandfather was Samuel Roffey Maitland (1792–1866). He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, being bracketed at the head of the moral sciences tripos of 1872, and winning the Whewell scholarship for international law. He was a Cambridge Apostle and President of the Cambridge Union.

Maitland was called to the bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1876, and became a competent equity lawyer and conveyancer, but finally devoted himself to comparative jurisprudence and especially the history of English law. He began a book on property law, but abandoned it out of frustration at certain features of English property law; he expressed these sentiments in an anonymous article in the Westminster Review in 1879, followed by three further articles in the Law Magazine and Review between 1881 and 1883.

In 1880, Maitland was introduced by Frederick Pollock, who had been to Eton and Cambridge with Maitland, to the Sunday Tramps, a walking club founded by Leslie Stephen. Through the Tramps, Maitland was introduced in 1884 to Paul Vinogradoff, a Russian medievalist who was in England to study records lodged in the Public Records Office (PRO). Maitland would later write that the day of their meeting "determined the rest of my life". Maitland's biographer and brother-in-law, H. A. L. Fisher, later claimed that he was so chagrined by the fact that a Russian knew more about English legal records than he did that he made his first visit to the PRO shortly thereafter, though Geoffrey Elton points out that Maitland had already been working in the archives before he met Vinogradoff.