Secrets of the Modern World

When we consider that some five thousand pages of detailed findings, written
about a hundred years ago, have been modified in only a few minor emphases
and one or two facts, and that the bulk of Maitland's edifice still stands, we can
begin to understand why he has an almost god-like status among historians who
know the problems he faced and the elegance of his solutions.

The great legal historian Vinogradoff disagreed with Maitland on some specific
points, but shortly after Maitland's death wrote of him as 'the greatest legal
historian of the law of England' and as a man to whom lawyers, historians and
sociologists were equally indebted: 'lawyers because of his subject, historians
because of his methods, sociologists because of his results.'

J.H.Hexter referred to Maitland as 'the greatest of English historians' in his
book on modern historians. R.G.Collingwood referred to the 'best historians,
like Mommsen and Maitland'. Denys Hay in his overview of western
historiography describes him as a 'giant' who, with Marc Bloch, is one of the 'two
greatest historians of recent times'. Bloch himself referred to 'the great English
jurist Maitland.' The medievalist Helen Cam ends her preface to his Selected
Essays by concluding fifty years after his death. 'Let us say with Powicke,
"Maitland is one of the immortals" and leave it at that.' G.O.Sayles wrote that
'In the range of his interests, the fineness of his intellect, and the considerable
bulk of what he wrote in barely twenty-five years, Maitland has no match among
English historians.'

Driven on by the sense of an impending early death Maitland tried to solve
within a period of some twenty years the same riddle as earlier thinkers. How
had the strange modern world, with its glimpses of liberty, equality and wealth,
been made? Why had it found its expression in a certain part of the world and in
its earliest and definitive form in England? What precisely were the constituents of this peculiar civilization? His solutions, much more deeply based on
documents, were in substance the same as those put forward by Montesquieu,
Adam Smith and Tocqueville. The essence of modernity lay in the separation of
spheres, the tensions between religion, politics, kinship and economy. Out of
these contradictions emerged certain liberties and a dynamic energy.

A whole set of factors, from the general (the nature of islandhood, the
accident of the Norman Conquest, the absence of Cathar heresies and the
inquisition), to the individual (the personality of Henry II or Edward I) played
their part. What happened on one small island both reflected what happened on
its neighbouring continent, but also transformed it. Like some new species of
finch on the Galapagos, there developed a new kind of civilization. This would
then be magnified and taken to its extreme through other accidents, the
development of America, the expansion of the British Empire and the first
indu...