F.W. Maitland

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

Frederic William Maitland was born at 53 Guilford Street, London in 1850, the only son and second of three children of John Gorham Maitland and of Emma, daughter of John Frederic

Daniell. His grandfather was Samuel Roffey Maitland. Maitland''s father was a barrister but, having little practice, became a civilservant, serving as secretary to the Civil Service Commission

.

Maitland was educated at a preparatory school in Brighton before entering Eton College in 1863, where Edward Daniel Stone was his private tutor. At Eton, Maitland was not prominent either academically or athletically, although a close school friend thought he would become "a kind of philosophic Charles Lamb". He then matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1869 as a commoner. A dislike of classics acquired at Eton initially led him to read mathematics, with little success. Then, inspired by Henry Sidgwick, he switched to the relatively new moral sciences tripos in 1870, and took first-class honours in 1872, being bracketed senior with his friend William Cunningham; he was elected a scholar of his college the same year. The following year, he took his degree and won the Whewell Scholarship ininternational law.

Popular among his contemporaries, Maitland was elected secretary, then president, of the Cambridge Union. He was also, like his father before him, a Cambridge Apostle. A lover of exercise since his Eton days, he rowed for Trinity and ran for the university, winning a blue for representing the university in three-mile races.

After Cambridge, Maitland tried to gain a fellowship in philosophy at Trinity College in 1875 with a dissertation entitled A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality: As Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge, but was beaten out by fellow Apostle James Ward. Having joined Lincoln''s Inn as a student in 1872, he was called to the bar there in 1876,and became a competent equity lawyer and conveyancer.