SOURCE: "Maitland as a Sociologist," in Sociological Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, April, 1937, pp. 121-35.

In the following essay, Barker discusses the sociological aspects of Maitland's historical writings.

Frederic William Maitland, the grandson of Samuel Maitland, a historian of the Dark Ages who was famous a hundred years ago, was born in 1850 and died at the end of 1906. Educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was called to the bar in 1876; but devoting himself to the study of law rather than its practice (as Jeremy Bentham had done before him), he came back to Cambridge in 1884 as Reader of English Law, and in 1888 he was elected Downing Professor of the Laws of England. In the twenty-two years of his teaching and writing in Cambridge, from the age of 34 to the age of 56, he achieved a volume of work, and accumulated a store of influence, which made him...