He was not without honour in his own generation. In that inclement December five invitations travelled out to Las Palmas,--from the University of Oxford that he should deliver the Romanes lecture, and from the United States of America that he should lecture at the Lowell Institute, at Harvard, and at the Universities of Columbia and Chicago. Academic honours had come to him in plenty. Cambridge and Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow and Cracow gave him their honorary degrees. He was corresponding member of the Royal Prussian and of the Royal Bavarian Academies, distinctions rarely conferred upon English scholars, an honorary Fellow of his old College, Trinity, an honorary Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, an original Fellow of the British Academy. The newly established bronze medal of the Harvard Law School was awarded to him in the last days of his life, and on the news of his death movements were set on foot at each of the great English Universities to do honour to his memory. At a public meeting held in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, on June 1, 1907, and addressed by some of the most eminent representatives of English learning it was resolved that "a Frederic William Maitland Memorial Fund should be established for the promotion of research and instruction in the history of law and legal language and institutions, and that this should be supplemented by a personal memorial to be placed in the Squire Library of the University[33]." At Oxford some students of law and history contributed to form a library of legal and social history to be called the Maitland Library, and to be connected with the Corpus Chair of Jurisprudence now held by Professor Vinogradoff. By the kindness of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls a room was lent to the Maitland Library in the front quadrangle of the College, and there the student may find Maitland's own copy of _Domesday Book_, together with many other volumes which had been in his possession and which bear the traces of his usage. As a token of his respect for Maitland's memory, and to further the skilled editing of a valuable repertory of knowledge, Mr Seebohm has presented to the Maitland Library his famous manuscript of the Denbigh Cartulary, one of the cardinal authorities for the history of Welsh land-tenures, and an edition of this collection of documents, executed by the pupils of the Corpus professor, will be the most appropriate tribute to Maitland's example in a University in which he might have been, but was not, an adopted son.
Business Brief
Frederick William Maitland — Part 89
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