Alan Macfarlane writes of F. W. Maitland:
When we consider that some five thousand pages of detailed
findings, written about a hundred years ago, have been modified in
only a few minor emphases and one or two facts, and that the bulk
of Maitland's edifice still stands, we can begin to understand why
he has an almost god-like status among historians who know the
problems he faced and the elegance of his solutions.
The great legal historian Vinogradoff disagreed with Maitland on
some specific points, but shortly after Maitland's death wrote of
him as 'the greatest legal historian of the law of England' and as
a man to whom lawyers, historians and sociologists were equally
indebted: 'lawyers because of his subject, historians because of
his methods, sociologists because of his results.'
J.H.Hexter referred to Maitland as 'the greatest of English
historians' in his book on modern historians. R.G.Collingwood
referred to the 'best historians, like Mommsen and Maitland'. Denys
Hay in his overview of western historiography describes him as a
'giant' who, with Marc Bloch, is one of the 'two greatest
historians of recent times'. Bloch himself referred to 'the great
English jurist Maitland.' The medievalist Helen Cam ends her
preface to his Selected Essays by concluding fifty years after his
death. 'Let us say with Powicke, "Maitland is one of the immortals"
and leave it at that.' G.O.Sayles wrote that 'In the range of his
interests, the fineness of his intellect, and the considerable bulk
of what he wrote in barely twenty-five years, Maitland has no match
among English historians.'
Driven on by the sense of an impending early death Maitland
tried to solve within a period of some twenty years the same riddle
as earlier thinkers. How had the strange modern world, with its
glimpses of liberty, equality and wealth, been made? Why had it
found its expression in a certain part of the world and in its
earliest and definitive form in England? What precisely were the
constituents of this peculiar civilization? His solutions, much
more deeply based on documents, were in substance the same as those
put forward by Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Tocqueville. The essence
of modernity lay in the separation of spheres, the tensions between
religion, politics, kinship and economy. Out of these
contradictions emerged certain liberties and a dynamic energy.
A whole set of factors, from the general (the nature of
islandhood, the accident of the Norman Conquest, the absence of
Cathar heresies and the inquisition), to the individual (the
personality of Henry II or Edward I) played their part. What
happened on one small island both reflected what happened on its
neighbouring continent, but also transformed it. Like some new
species of finch on the Galapagos, there developed a new kind of
civilization. This would then be magnified and taken to its extreme
through other accidents, the development of America, the expansion
of the British Empire and the first industrial revolution and so to
the modern world. With Maitland we have a developed theory which
puts forward a believable answer to one part of the question of how
the modern world has been made.
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