SOURCE: "The Characteristics of Maitland's Work," in Maitland: A Critical Examination and Assessment, Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 3-16.

In the following excerpt, Bell examines the defining characteristics of Maitland's works.

Historiography—the study of the ways in which men have applied themselves to the problem of writing history—has become a fashionable, perhaps too fashionable, subject. For the professional, in history as in any other craft, there must always be an interest in seeing how the greatest practitioners have gone about their business; but whether that interest is sufficient to justify the mass of work that has recently appeared on historiography is not so certain. In particular, an extended study of an individual historian would seem to be justifiable only in one of two circumstances: he must either have been, in some sort, a public figure in his own age, whose historical writing influenced political action of his...