"It was Maitland's good fortune to be only moderately successful academically as a young man, so he escaped the easy assurance of the eminently successful man looking at the world. He had to learn about documents the hard way, in a conveyancer's office. This taught him to keep close to the ground. He learned that the approach to history must be through drudgery, and that no amount of elegance, economy, and precision of mind can take the place of an enormous capacity for hard work. He had no successors. Yet in a sense all modern historical researchers are his successors. Maitland's virtues are the virtues we should all like to possess; his way of doing things is the way of all modern research."
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Historians from EnglandBiographers from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyLawyers from EnglandPeople from London
Original Language: English
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Sources
R. W. Southern, review of The Letters of Frederic William Maitland in History and Theory, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1967), p. 110
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederic_William_Maitland
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Frederic William Maitland
Frederic William Maitland (28 May 1850 – 19 December 1906) was an English historian and lawyer who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history.
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