Frederic William Maitland (28 May 1850 – ) was an English historian and lawyer who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history. Early life and education, 1850–72 Frederic William Maitland was born at 53 Guilford Street, London, in 1850, the only son and second of three children of John Gorham Maitland and of Emma, daughter of John Frederic Daniell. His grandfather was Samuel Roffey Maitland. Maitland's father was a barrister but, having little practice, became a civil servant, serving as secretary to the Civil Service Commission. Maitland was educated at a preparatory school in Brighton before entering Eton College in 1863, where Edward Daniel Stone was his private tutor. At Eton, Maitland was not prominent either academically or athletically, although a close school friend thought he would become "a kind of philosophic Charles Lamb". He then matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1869 as a commoner. A dislike of classics acquired at Eton initially led him to read mathematics, with little success. Then, inspired by Henry Sidgwick, he switched to the relatively new moral sciences tripos in 1870, and took first-class honours in 1872, being bracketed senior with his friend William Cunningham; he was elected a scholar of his college the same year. The following year, he took his degree and won the Whewell Scholarship in international law. Popular among his contemporaries, Maitland was elected secretary, then president, of the Cambridge Union. He was also, like his father before him, a Cambridge Apostle. A lover of exercise since his Eton days, he rowed for Trinity and ran for the university, winning a blue for representing the university in three-mile races. Maitland's mother had died in 1851, shortly after the birth of his younger sister. Then, both his father and grandfather died when he was still at school. From his grandfather he inherited a manor house and some land in Brookthorpe, Gloucestershire. The estate provided him with an income until the agricultural depression in the 1880s. Career at the bar and early efforts, 1872–84 Career at the bar After Cambridge, Maitland tried to gain a fellowship in philosophy at Trinity College in 1875 with a dissertation entitled A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality: As Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge, but was beaten out by fellow Apostle James Ward. Having joined Lincoln's Inn as a student in 1872,