In the course of his researches for the History of English Law Maitland had been drawn into the unfamiliar region of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, a department of knowledge once of the highest importance throughout Europe, but, save for one exception, fallen into complete desuetude at the English Universities ever since the study of the Canon Law was proscribed by Henry VIII. The exception was provided by William Stubbs. That great master of medieval history had from his Oxford Chair delivered and subsequently published two lectures upon the Canon Law in England. A stout patriot and a high Anglican, Stubbs was concerned to exhibit the continuity of the English Church before and after the Reformation; and both in his Oxford lectures and in a famous report drawn up for the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts he gave the weight of his authority to the opinion that the Canon Law of Rome, though held to be of great authority in England during the Middle Ages, was not recognised to be binding on the Courts Christian of this country. The verdict of so fine a scholar was eagerly welcomed by men of High Church opinions. If the Canon Law was not binding, then the Church of England was never in the full sense ultramontane, and the changes of the sixteenth century did not amount to revolution. Zealots went further still. There were those who, as Maitland wittily observed, seemed to believe that the Church of England was "Protestant before the Reformation and Catholic afterwards."

In the quarrel between the Highs and Lows Maitland had no interest. Then, as always, he was a dissenter from all the Churches: but historical truth was precious to him, and in the course of the summer of 1895, while engaged in the preparation of a course of lectures upon the Canon Law, he became gradually aware that the received opinion could no longer stand. The agent of his conversion, if conversion it can be called, was the Provinciale of William Lyndwood, a popular text-book written in 1430 by the principal official of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and representative of the accepted opinion in the century preceding the Protestant Reformation. The following letter to Mr R. L. Poole explains the genesis of a book which has permanently deflected the current of historical opinion.

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Horsepools,
Stroud.
15th August, 1895.

I ought to have been writing lectures about the history of the Canon Law. Instead of so doing I have been led away into a lengthy discourse on Lyndwood. I have come to a result that seems to be heterodox, but I do not know exactly how heterodox it is and should be extremely grateful if you would give me your opinion upon a question which lies rather within your studies than within mine. It seems to me clear, that in Lyndwood's view the law laid down in the three great papal law-books is statute law for the English ecclesiastical courts and overrules all the provincial constitutions, and further that apart from the law contained in these books the Church of England has hardly any law—in short there is next to nothing that can be called English Canon Law. I must wait until I am again in Cambridge to read what has been written about this matter in modern times, but any word of counsel that you can give me will be treasured. From a remark that you once made I inferred that in your opinion our Church historians have been too patriotic. I feel pretty sure of this after spending two months with Lyndwood, and if I find that my conclusions about the law of our ecclesiastical courts are at variance with the prevailing doctrine, may be I shall print what I have been writing, that is to say if either L. Q. R. or E. H. R., will let me trail my coat through its pages.

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Roman Canon Law in the Church of England appeared in 1898. It was a collection of six essays, one of which—the delightful story of the Deacon who turned Jew for the love of a Jewess—had been published as far back as 1886. Of the rest the decisive part consisted of articles contributed to the English Historical Review in 1896 and 1897. So far as a case can be demolished by argument, the case for the legal continuity of the Church in England was demolished by Maitland. He proved that the Popes' decretals were regarded as absolutely binding by our English canonists; that throughout Christendom the Pope was regarded as the Universal Ordinary or supreme source of Jurisdiction; that a considerable portion of the Canon Law was built out of English cases; that the provincial constitutions in England were of the nature of bye-laws and insignificant, while the libraries of our canonists were filled with foreign treatises; in fine, that the thirty-two Commissioners who set their names to the opinion that the ecclesiastical judges in England were not bound by the statutes which the Popes had decreed for all the faithful would have been condemned by any English ecclesiastical tribunal in the Middle Ages as guilty of heresy. No doubt portions of the Canon Law were not as a matter of fact enforced in England, but this was not because the Courts Christian rejected them, but because the Temporal power would not permit their enforcement.

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.