Maitland and the legal historians

Sir Frederick Pollock delivered a law lecture in 1882 at University College, Liverpool. Edward Jenks was Liverpool’s first full-time professor. He was appointed in 1892 to a chair in the recently created Faculty of Law. In 1895, he became the Queen Victoria Chair of Law. Jenks spent four years at Liverpool before taking up a Readership at Oxford.  Sir Paul Vinogradoff, the medievalist and sometime Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, was awarded an honorary doctorate by Liverpool in 1909.

But of these legal historian connections, perhaps the most interesting is the link to Frederick William (FW) Maitland (1850-1906). In 1883 and 1884, Maitland delivered a course of lectures at Liverpool.  A copy of a ‘syllabus of lectures on English law’, given by Maitland in the October term of 1883, survives in our University archive, as does a copy of the examination paper set for Christmas 1883.

Pg.1 of Syllabus of Lectures on English Law by F W Maitland, 1883 (by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library D55-2-1)

Examination in English Law paper, University College, Liverpool, Christmas 1883 (by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library D55-2-2)

Before his early death in 1906, Maitland would go on to become the Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Selden Society, and a doyen of legal history scholarship.

Liverpool holds two items that celebrate this link between the University and Maitland. A portrait of Maitland (pictured) is held in the Victoria Gallery & Museum. This was acquired in 1978. To commemorate the Maitland connection and the Faculty of Laws move into the new Law Building in 1966, the Fellows of Downing College, Cambridge, presented a beautiful bound Manuscript of Maitland’s Lectures on Jurisprudence.  The inscription on the first leaf reads: 'This manuscript of Frederic William Maitland was presented by the Master and Fellows of Downing College on the occasion of the opening of the new Law School of the University of Liverpool, A.D. 1966'. The Dean, Professor Seaborne Davies, also presented a number of valuable English legal works of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Bound Manuscript of Maitland’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1966 (by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library D5-2)

Pg.1, Manuscript of Maitland’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1966 (by courtesy of the University of Liverpool Library D5-2-2)

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