In his inaugural lecture as Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge, delivered in October 1888, Frederic Maitland offered a set of provocative and now familiar reflections on “Why the history of English law is not written.” According to Maitland, although English archives possessed “a series of records which for continuity, catholicity, minute detail[,] and authoritative value” had “no equal…in the world,” the “unmanageable bulk” of these sources had “overburdened” aspiring historians of English law. As a result, “large provinces” of English legal history remained to be “reclaimed from the waste.” With few willing to undertake such reclamation efforts, the historiography of English law remained as bleak and barren as the bogs from which Maitland's Cambridgeshire had itself only reluctantly emerged.
