He had already begun to apply dissolvent legal tests to "our easy talk of village communities." The English village, he remarked in 1892, "owns no land, and, according to our common law, it is incapable of owning land. It never definitely attained to a juristic personality." The village community of the picturesque easy-going antiquarian, who, fascinated by Maine's beautiful generalisations, was ready to find traces of archaic communism in every quarter, only reminded him of the remark in Scott's _Antiquary_ "Pretorian here Pretorian there I mind the bigging o't." In two weighty articles contributed to the _Law Quarterly Review_ in 1893 upon the subject of Archaic Communities, Maitland pricked some antiquarian bubbles with delicious dexterity and threw out a suggestion that the formula of development should be "neither from communalism to individualism" nor yet "from individualism to communalism" but from "the vague to the definite." In common with Hegel he believed that the world process consisted in the development of the spirit of reason becoming more and more articulate with every fresh discrimination of the intellect.
By amazing industry and a most rigid economy of time Maitland had combined with his professional duties and with the publication of several volumes of unprinted matter the composition of an elaborate treatise upon medieval law. The _History of English Law up to the time of Edward I_ appeared in 1895. The work had been planned in conjunction with Maitland's old friend, Sir Frederick Pollock, was revised in common with him and issued under their joint names; but as Sir Frederick explained in a note appended to the Preface "by far the greater share of the execution" both in respect of the writing and the research belonged to Maitland. The book at once took rank as a classic. In range and quality of knowledge it invited comparison with the monumental achievement of Stubbs; and though it was necessarily of a highly technical character, the style was so easy and lucid that persons previously unversed in the technicalities of medieval, or indeed of modern, law, were able to read it with enjoyment.
The greater portion of the book deals advisedly with a comparatively limited period,--the age which lies between 1154 and 1272. "It is a luminous age throwing light on both past and future. It is an age of good books, the time of Glanvill and Richard FitzNeal, of Bracton and Matthew Paris, an age whose wealth of cartularies, manorial surveys and plea-rolls has of recent years been in part, though only in part, laid open before us in print. Its law is more easily studied than the law of a later time, when no lawyer wrote a treatise, and when the judicial records had grown to so unwieldy a bulk that we can hardly hope that much will ever be known about them. The Year Books--more especially in their present disgraceful plight--- must be very dark to us if we cannot go behind them and learn something about the growth of those 'forms of action' which the fourteenth century inherited as the framework of its law. And if the age of Glanvill and Bracton throws light forward, it throws light backward also. Our one hope of interpreting the _Leges Henrici_, that almost unique memorial of the really feudal stage of legal history, our one hope of coercing Domesday Book to deliver up its hoarded secrets, our one hope of making an Anglo-Saxon land-book mean something definite, seems to lie in an effort to understand the law of the Angevin time as though we ourselves lived in it."