Books by F. W. Maitland

As the Downing Professor of the Laws of England, F. W. Maitland lectured on equity at Cambridge for 18 years, ending in 1906. This text replicates the 1936 second edition publication of these lectures, edited by J. Brunyate, who added some notes to Maitland's work.

Frederick William Maitland (1850-1906) is generally regarded as the modern father of English legal history. In this volume, which was originally published in 1898, Maitland discusses the development of English towns, and the concurrent transition from rural to urban habits which occurred amongst the townspeople.

In his foreword Professor Holt looks afresh at this monument of medieval scholarship, assessing its place both within the wider context of historical study, and also, more specifically, its continued contribution to that debate on the nature of Domesday Book with which scholars have been preoccupied for nearly one hundred years.

The essays collected in State, Trust and Corporation contain the reflections of England's greatest legal historian on the legal, historical and philosophical origins of the idea of the state. All written in the first years of the twentieth century, Maitland's essays are classics both of historical writing and of political theory. They contain a series of profound insights into the way the character of the state has been shaped by the non-political associations that exist alongside it, and their themes are of continuing relevance today. This is the first new edition of these essays for sixty years, and the first of any kind to contain full translations, glossary and expository introduction. It has been designed to make Maitland's writings fully accessible to the non-specialist, and to make available to anyone interested in the idea of the state some of the most important modern writings in English on that subject.