Royal prohibitions did not prove the existence of a national Canon Law. "To prove that we must see an ecclesiastical judge, whose hands are free and who has no 'prohibition' to fear, rejecting a decretal because it infringes the law of the English Church or because that Church has not received it." Whatever might be the view of a late age, no such testimony was forthcoming before the breach with Rome. Indeed the "one great work of our English canonist in the fifteenth century" showed that the position which had been attributed to the English Church in the Middle Ages was alien to its whole way of thought. In the age of the conciliar movement, when men of liberal temperament were urging that the Pope was subject to a general council, William Lyndwood evidenced nothing but "a conservative curialism."

The book was necessarily controversial, but written with that complete absence of the polemical spirit which characterised all Maitland's work. "I hope and trust," he wrote to Mr Poole, September 12, 1898, "that you were not very serious when you said that the bishop was sore. I feel for him a respect so deep, that if you told me that the republication of my essays would make him more unhappy than a sane man is whenever people dissent from him, I should be in great doubt what to do. It is not too late to destroy all or some of the sheets. I hate to bark at the heels of a great man whom I admire, but tried hard to seem as well as to be respectful."

An accident of friendship drew Maitland still further into the tormented sea of controversial church history. Lord Acton was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1895, and, despite radical differences of creed and outlook, soon discovered in Maitland a spirit as ardent and disinterested as his own. Outwardly there was a great contrast between the two men, Maitland frail and delicate, his pale eager face a lamp of humour and curiosity, Acton massive, reserved, deliberate; but they understood one another, and soon came to share a common interest in a great literary enterprise. One day Acton propounded to Maitland the scheme for a great Cambridge history written upon the combined plan which was already familiar in France and Germany. It was to be a Universal History, a history of the whole world from the first beginnings to the present day, written by an army of specialists, and concentrating the latest results of special study. Maitland suggested that a more modest plan, a history of modern Europe since the Reformation, would prove to be more practical, and in this view Acton concurred.

The Cambridge Modern History covered a period which did not properly fall within Maitland's special range of study; but he was taken into counsel as to the general execution of the plan, and persuaded to contribute a chapter upon the Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation. That Acton should have chosen Maitland for this particular piece of work may cause some surprise. The ground was intricate, sown with pitfalls and clouded with controversy, and Maitland had made no special study of the sixteenth century upon the political or religious side. On the other hand he could bring to the task a cool, dispassionate judgment, a fine power for appraising historical evidence, and a singular and exact felicity in the expression of delicate shades of certainty and doubt. That he stood outside the Churches might have been a disqualification, had devotional impulses been the staple consideration in the question, or if the banners of rival confessions were not already waving on the battle field; but the age of Elizabeth was theological rather than religious, and it was of the first importance to obtain the verdict of a thoroughly impartial mind upon a subject which could never be treated by a churchman without some suspicion of partisanship attaching to his results. Maitland accepted the task with misgivings, and discharged it with characteristic thoroughness. In an astonishingly short space of time his mind filled itself up with the reports of French and Spanish ambassadors, with the theological treatises and the political intrigues of sixteenth century Europe. A month or so after he had taken the plunge he was talking of Caraffa and Cecil as if he had known them all his life, and seemed to have gathered up the whole complicated web of European policy into his hands. He did not content himself with mastering and reproducing the voluminous literature of the subject; some pretty little discoveries, some "Elizabethan gleanings" were contributed to the English Historical Review, and gave evidence of refined investigations which did not stop at printed material. Results which might have furnished the theme for a substantial volume were packed into a chapter of forty pages. Critics complained of obscurity not of thought but of allusion; others, imperfectly versed in Tudor history, of a defective sympathy with religious emotion. The first charge is true; for Maitland was undoubtedly over-allusive, not from ostentation but from absorption and from a tendency common to learned and modest men to credit the general reader with more knowledge than he is likely to possess. To the second allegation it is some reply that Maitland was inclined to attribute the most decisive act in the period, Elizabeth's resolve to reject the Roman overtures, to religious rather than to political motives.

With habitual modesty Maitland disclaimed the possession of the gift of narration. He would say that he could not tell a story; and the character of his historical work was not adapted to exercise the story-telling gift. But if his narrative has not the liquid flow of some accredited masters of the art, it is entirely devoid of some common defects. It is never indefinite, flabby or verbose, on the contrary it is full of pith and fire, proceeding by a series of brief vivid touches which take root in the memory and ripen there. It would be easy to select from the chapter upon the Scottish Reformation and the Anglican settlement a florilegium of passages which, for keenness of insight and terseness of expression, could not easily be surpassed. It is a style which gives the impression not only of clairvoyance and watchfulness as to small details, transient motives and ephemeral phases of opinion, but also of a sense of the fundamental significance of things and of their relevance in the general march of progress. Every stroke is made to tell. In general nothing is so tedious as a history constructed upon severe philosophical principles. The argument swallows up the life; the characters become faint and evanescent; the colour put upon one event is shaded by the reflection of events which follow, and an oft repeated major premise leads through an appropriate selection of devitalised incidents to a familiar conclusion. Maitland's fragment of Reformation history is philosophical in the best sense. It is alive to the ultimate principles of belief and conduct which governed men and women in the years when the Thirty-Nine Articles were in the making; but it is also very vivid and concrete. The tale has been told more fully, more comfortably, with a greater display of picturesque circumstance, but never with more intellect, or with so exact an appreciation of the chronological order in which successive phases of belief and opinion revealed themselves. Instead of history ready-made Maitland gave us history in the making, antedating nothing and excluding with a care no less scrupulous than Gardiner's the world's knowledge of to-morrow from the world's knowledge of to-day. More than one fairy story dissolved at his touch, among others the tale of a Convocation summoned in 1559 to consent to the Act of Uniformity. The parent of the legend, an Anglican Canon, with a comical misapprehension of his antagonist's resources, ventured to measure swords with Maitland who had exposed his shortcomings in a Magazine. The encounter was amusing and decisive. It was also characteristic of some English peculiarities. We are a nation of bold amateurs. A German pastor who had been corrected by Savigny upon some points of history would hardly have returned to the charge without betraying some suspicion that his enterprise was unpromising if not forlorn.

[IX.]

Not the least brilliant passage in Domesday Book and Beyond was a novel theory as to the origin and early history of the English Borough. The question of municipal origins had produced a library of controversial literature upon the Continent. One writer developed the town from the feudal domain, another from the "immunity," a third from the guild, a fourth from the market, a fifth from the free village, and there were combinations and permutations of these and other factors. Maitland was impressed by the arguments of Dr Keutgen of Jena, who found the origin and criterion of the German borough in its fortification. The idea transplanted into Maitland's mind became surprisingly fruitful. Scattered fragments of evidence seemed to confirm the surmise that in the English Midlands at least the county town was the county fortress, owing its origin to military necessity and supported by a variety of artificial arrangements. There was the evidence of language, for borough originally means a fortified house; the evidence of the map, for in many counties of England the county town is somewhere near the centre; the evidence of warlike stress, for the Danes were foemen even more terrible than those wild Hungarians against whom Henry the Fowler built his Saxon "burhs"; the evidence of Domesday Book, showing contrivances at once careful and varied for maintaining town walls and town garrisons; and here and there a gleam of light from older documents, from the Burghal Hidage of the tenth century, or from a charter of King Alfred. The argument, which was expounded with beautiful clearness and ingenuity, led on to the conclusion that the town court was the product of "tenural heterogeneity," for the garrison men holding of different lords would need a special court to decide their controversies. There was thus a greater degree of governmental artifice in the process than had hitherto been suspected. The borough was not merely a very prosperous village; it was a unit in a scheme of national defence; a fortified town maintained by a district for military purposes with "mural houses" and "knight guilds" and a miscellaneous garrison contributed by shire thegns. By degrees trade, commerce, agriculture, the interests of the market and the town fields would overpower the military characteristics of the county stronghold. But the scheme should not be pressed too far; "no general theory will tell the story of every or any particular town."

In the autumn of 1897 Maitland gave the Ford Lectures in Oxford. The foundation was recent, and Maitland was chosen to succeed S. R. Gardiner, who had delivered the opening course in the previous year. Gardiner had lectured extempore on "Cromwell's Place in History"; Maitland delivered a series of carefully written dissertations upon "Township and Borough," a subject as little likely, one would think, to hold together an audience in the Schools as any that could be imagined. The ordinary man is not interested in law, still less in medieval law, and less again in the metaphysics of medieval law; but a large and constant audience was interested in Maitland. His style of lecturing was distinctive and original—the voice deep, grave, expressive, the delivery dramatic, the substance compounded of subtle speculation and playful wit and recondite learning. The lectures which were learnt by heart were delivered with a verve and earnestness which impressed many a hearer who was entirely indifferent to the particular issues or to the whole region of learning to which they belonged. When and how did the Borough become a Corporation? Who owned the Town fields? In what sense was the medieval borough a land-owning community? What did King John mean when he granted the vill of Cambridge to the burgesses and their heirs? With Maitland's artful spells upon her Oxford felt that such questions as these might be very grave and not a little gay.