Frederick W. Maitland | |
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Born | May 28, 1850 |
Died | c. December 19, 1906 Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain | (aged 56)
Education | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Occupation | Historian |
Title | Downing Professor of the Laws of England |
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Frederic William Maitland FBA (28 May 1850 – c. 19 December 1906) was an English historian and jurist who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history.[1][2] From 1884 until his death in 1906, he was reader in English law, then Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge.
Born into a distinguished intellectual family, Maitland was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Leaving for the bar after an initial failure to obtain a fellowship at Cambridge, he returned to academia in 1884, and quickly became one of the most distinguished historians of his generation.