In the autumn of 1897 Maitland gave the Ford Lectures in Oxford. The foundation was recent, and Maitland was chosen to succeed S. R. Gardiner, who had delivered the opening course in the previous year. Gardiner had lectured extempore on "Cromwell's Place in History"; Maitland delivered a series of carefully written dissertations upon "Township and Borough," a subject as little likely, one would think, to hold together an audience in the Schools as any that could be imagined. The ordinary man is not interested in law, still less in medieval law, and less again in the metaphysics of medieval law; but a large and constant audience was interested in Maitland. His style of lecturing was distinctive and original--the voice deep, grave, expressive, the delivery dramatic, the substance compounded of subtle speculation and playful wit and recondite learning. The lectures which were learnt by heart were delivered with a verve and earnestness which impressed many a hearer who was entirely indifferent to the particular issues or to the whole region of learning to which they belonged. When and how did the Borough become a Corporation? Who owned the Town fields? In what sense was the medieval borough a land-owning community? What did King John mean when he granted the vill of Cambridge to the burgesses and their heirs? With Maitland's artful spells upon her Oxford felt that such questions as these might be very grave and not a little gay.
The wonderful work which has here been imperfectly described was accomplished under a shadow. Maitland, who was never really a strong man, was, even before his marriage, not without warnings that he was overtaxing his physical resources. When he delivered his inaugural lecture he was already conscious that his days might be few. "I see again," writes one who was present, "the dim room, the grey light and the shadowy but inspired fragileness of the lecturer who was then fighting a very serious illness.... It was no ordinary lecture, rather a sort of sermon, grave and beautiful with its solemn call to work, even though that work might lie in humble and obscure fields. And the impression that was perhaps most immediately insistent, seeming to underlie each word and sentence, was that the speaker felt the hours of his own work to be already numbered and but few." In 1889, the year after his election to the Downing Chair, a doctor pronounced over him a sentence from which there is generally no successful appeal. "I very much want to see you again," he wrote to a friend, March 12, 1889, "and I don't know that I can wait for another year; this I say rather seriously and _only to you_; many things are telling me that I have not got unlimited time at my command and I have to take things very easily."