One of the principal subjects which engaged Maitland's mind during these years was the history of the Corporation. Problems connected with the growth and definition of the Corporate idea had furnished the theme of the Ford Lectures and a course upon the Corporation in English law was delivered in Cambridge in the Autumn Term of 1899. It was a subject from which Maitland derived deep and peculiar delight. It brought into play the full range of his faculties, for it was at once metaphysical, legal and historical. It was associated with the enquiries which he had already been making into municipal origins, and into the law of the medieval Church, while, at the same time, it was connected with some living and familiar developments of modern law, with those corporate groups which, during the later half of the nineteenth century "had been multiplying all the world over at a rate far outstripping the increase of natural persons." Trades unions and joint-stock companies, chartered boroughs and medieval universities, village communities and townships, merchant guilds and crafts, every form of association known to medieval or modern life came within his view, as illustrating the way in which Englishmen attempted "to distinguish and reconcile the manyness of the members and the oneness of the body." An enquiry of this kind was something entirely new in England. Here lawyers had accepted from the Canonists the view that the Corporation was a fiction of the law created by the authoritative act of the State. A mindless thing, "incapable of knowing, intending, willing, acting, distinct from the living corporators who are called its members," the Corporation is and must be the creature of the State. "Into its nostrils the State must breathe the breath of fictitious life, for otherwise it would be no animated body but individualistic dust." Solus princeps fingit quod in rei veritate non est. Such a theory was, as Maitland pointed out, likely to play into the hands of the paternal despot. The Corporation so conceived—and this is how not only Savigny but Blackstone also conceived it—was no subject for liberties and franchises and rights of self-government. It was but "a wheel in the State machinery." And yet in England, where the Concession theory of the Corporation was received without challenge, there had certainly not been less of autonomy and free grouping in guilds and fellowships than elsewhere. The secret of this apparent contradiction, between a theory which made corporateness the creature of a sovereign authority and a practice which enabled permanent groups to be freely formed without such authority, was to be found in a legal conception peculiar to England, the conception of the Trust. "Behind the screen of trustees and concealed from the direct scrutiny of legal theories, all manner of groups can flourish: Lincoln's Inn, or Lloyds, or the Stock Exchange, or the Jockey Club, a whole presbyterian system or even the Church of Rome with the Pope at its head...." Even a large company, trading with a joint-stock with vendible shares and a handsome measure of "limited liability," could be constructed by means of a trust deed without any incorporation. Aided by this "loose trust-concept," under the shelter of which organic groups of the most various kinds could live and prosper, English lawyers were not vitally concerned with the theory of the Corporation. The law of the Corporation was only one part, and probably not the most important part, of the English fellowship-law, but in Germany, where no such convenient shelter had been provided for the "unincorporate body," the case was different, and active discussion had raged round the nature of the Corporation. The fiction theory invented by Sinibald Fieschi, who became Pope Innocent IV in 1243, and developed and expounded by Savigny, had proved itself inadequate in an age of joint-stock companies and railway collisions; and in the rising tide of German nationalism men were prone to question the validity of a conception derived from the alien jurisprudence of Rome. A new school of thinkers arose preaching the theory of the Genossenschaft or Fellowship. They held that the German Fellowship was neither fictitious nor State-made, that it was "a living organism, and a real person with body and members and will of its own," a group-person with a group-will. The most important representative of this new school of German realists was Dr Gierke, whose work Maitland introduced to the British public after his first winter exile in Grand Canary.

Maitland had followed with unflagging interest and steady enthusiasm the great outburst of legal literature in Germany which preceded the construction of the German Civil Code. Of the Code itself he wrote that "it was the most carefully considered statement of a nation's law that the world has ever seen"; while he found in the legal debate of the Germanist and Romanist schools work which sometimes showed "a delicacy of touch and a subtlety of historical perception," of which Englishmen, "having no pressing need for comparison," could know little. For the purpose which Maitland had in view, the explanation of the way in which Englishmen had conceived of group life in its various embodiments, this subtle and delicate treatment of the forms of legal thought, this "ideal morphology" of the Germans, was no less full of suggestion than the ample historical science with which it was supported. It provided tests, and suggested those points of analogy and contrast between English and German development, which give to Maitland's treatment of the Corporate and Unincorporate Body the quality of an original discourse upon the legal and political theory of Western Europe.

Nor was the interest of the subject merely speculative. Maitland was a practical lawyer with a genius for detecting the source of bad law and bad administration in confused modes of thinking about ultimate questions. Looking for the moment at the English law concerning Corporations through the spectacles of a German realist, he detected as the principal offence against jurisprudence "a certain half-heartedness in our treatment of unincorporate groups." We were unwilling to recognise trades-unions for example as persons, while we made fairly adequate provision for their continuous life. The consequence of this half-heartedness was felt in the domain of public administration as well as in the domain of private law. Englishmen had accepted "a bad and foreign theory, which coupling corporateness with princely privilege refused to recognise and call forth into vigour the bodiliness that was immanent in every township." The Americans had been less pedantic and had permitted the New England town to develop its inherent corporateness. We, on the contrary, influenced by the Concession theory of the Corporation, had shrunk from declaring the village to be a legal person, the subject of rights and the object of gifts. The consequences of this fatal blunder were not measurable merely in terms of administrative symmetry; but so measured they were very great. No one knew better than Maitland the "appalling mess" of English local government. He had described its broader features in Justice and Police; he analysed certain underlying sources of confusion in Township and Borough. In his Introduction to Gierke's Political Theories of the Middle Ages he was disposed to ascribe no small part of this confusion to the timidity "tardily redressed by the invention of Parish Councils" which had stood between the English village and legal personality.

Other defects of loose and imperfect thinking upon the Corporation were pointed out to the readers of the Law Quarterly Review in the articles entitled the "Corporation Sole and the Crown as Corporation." The American State has private rights; it has power to sue: English law, on the other hand, had never yet formally admitted that the Corporate realm, besides being the wielder of public power, might also be the subject of private rights, the owner of lands and chattels. Our habit is to speak of the Sovereign as a corporation sole, and to refuse to recognise him as the head of a complex and highly organised "corporation aggregate of many." Such modes of thought, however well they may have fitted the designs of Tudor despotism, were neither appropriate to the needs of a free community nor adjusted to the conditions of modern life. The talk about "Kings who do not die, who are never under age, who are ubiquitous, who do no wrong and think no wrong" had "not been innocuous"; and other practical inconveniences were involved in the identification of the Common-wealth with the person of the Sovereign and in the failure to discriminate between the natural and official aspects of the Sovereign's personality. Special legislation, for instance, had been required to secure private estates for Kings. For these insular peculiarities there were, of course, assignable historical reasons, and one of these reasons, which Maitland was the first to suggest, is certainly very curious. The idea of treating the King of England as a corporation sole had occurred to Coke, or some other lawyer of Coke's day, because the parson had already been treated as a corporation sole. Why, when and how the parson came so to be treated furnishes matter for a very pretty piece of historical investigation. Who would have imagined that an unfortunate analogy, striking across the mind of a Tudor lawyer, would have helped to give to the legal aspect of the English State a peculiar colour—a colour different from that which it has received, for instance, in America. Without a superb knowledge of the Year Books, who could have fixed the offence upon Richard Broke or upon one of Richard Broke's contemporaries? And how many men, having mastered the recondite knowledge of the Year Books, would have retained a sense of the large perspectives of history sufficiently strong and vivid as to apprehend the successive legal and political forces which gave support to a "juristic abortion" through three and a half centuries of national life?

Apart from their interest for the professional student of legal antiquities, Maitland's papers upon Trust and Corporation possess an enduring value by reason of the fine touches of legal and historical perception which are scattered so freely through them. A collection of acute and brilliant observations might without difficulty be made from this as from any other portion of his historical work. "All that we English people mean by religious liberty has been intimately connected with the making of Trusts. Persons who can never be in the wrong are useless in a Court of law. The making of grand theories has never been our strong point. The theory which lies upon the surface is sometimes a borrowed theory which has never penetrated far, while the really vital principles must be sought for in out of the way places. A dogma is of no importance unless and until there is some great desire within it. Quasi is one of the few Latin words that English lawyers really love. English history can never be an elementary subject. We are not logical enough to be elementary." Such phrases, even if detached from their context, have a life of their own, but they cannot be so detached without the loss of the greater part of their significance. An epigram may be an extraneous flourish as irrelevant to all substantial purpose as the ornament of the bad architect. Maitland's wit was seldom otiose; it was a shining segment in the solid masonry of argument.

In the summer of 1907 Maitland delivered the Rede Lecture at Cambridge, choosing for his theme English Law and the Renaissance. It was his object to show how, when Humanism was reviving the study of Roman law, when Roman law was expelling German law from Germany and winning victories over the relics of Anglo-Norman custom in Scotland, England succeeded in preserving her medieval law books despite their bad Latin and their worse French. The secret was to be found in an institution peculiar to this country, in the existence of the Inns of Court. "Unchartered, unprivileged, unendowed, without remembered founders, these groups of lawyers formed themselves, and in course of time evolved a scheme of legal education; an academic scheme of the medieval sort, oral and disputatious.... We may well doubt whether aught else would have saved English law in the age of the Reception." But the lecture, though based upon minute enquiries, was not purely historical. After pointing out that a hundred legislatures were now building on that foundation of English law—"the work which was not submerged"—Maitland surveyed the prospects for the future and pronounced that the unity of English law was precarious. Queensland had made her own penal code in 1895; other colonies might follow in the same way. The Germans, "by a mighty effort of science and forbearance," had unified their law upon a national and historical basis. Might not the British Parliament endeavour to put out work which would be a model for the British world? "To make law that is worthy of acceptance for free communities that are not bound to accept it, this would be no mean ambition. Nihil aptius, nihil efficacius ad plures provincias sub uno imperio retinendas et fovendas. But it is hardly to Parliament that one's hopes must turn in the first instance." Certain ancient and honourable societies, proud of a past that is unique in the history of the world, may become fully conscious of the heavy weight of responsibility that was assumed when English law schools saved, but isolated, English law in the days of the Reception. "In that case the glory of Bruges, the glory of Bologna, the glory of Harvard, may yet be theirs." The lecturer paused, and then surveying the crowded Senate House added, with an effect which those who heard him cannot forget, certain words which have not been printed. "But," he concluded, "I see, Mr Vice-Chancellor, that strangers are present."