Maitland lived to complete three volumes of the Year Books. The French was printed on one side of the page, a translation executed in terse and faithful English on the other. Those who were familiar with the work of the Literary Director of the Selden Society had no cause for surprise at the exquisite finish of the editing. They were prepared for an elaborate _apparatus criticus_, for a careful account of the manuscripts, and for such notes as might be requisite to explain allusions and to elucidate obscurities. The great discovery, that the Reports were not official records but the private note books of law students, was so entirely in Maitland's happy and characteristic vein, that, although no one else had earned the title to make it, it was quite natural that it should be made by him. But there was one feature in the Introduction to the first volume which startled even his admirers. The editor took occasion to settle the grammar and syntax of the Anglo-French language, its nouns and its verbs, its declensions and its tenses. His friends had known him as lawyer, historian, diplomatist, paleographer, and no exhibition of excellence in any one of these departments would have afforded them the slightest sensation of novelty; but they had not divined in him the philologist and grammarian.
In answer to surprised congratulations, he said, with the quick sparkle of humour which his friends knew so well, that he would go down to posterity as the author of "Maitland's law"; he had discovered that such few Anglo-French verbs as possessed "an imperfect on active service" rarely employed their preterites. The experts in medieval French have applauded the work, and the editors of the _Cambridge History of English Literature_ have thought good to reprint it. In the course of a winter spent under a blue sky Maitland had made a really important contribution to medieval philology. And yet, far as he carried his investigations into the forms, the structure, and the orthography of the language which he found in his manuscripts of the fourteenth century, philology was not the primary object of his quest. He wished to edit his text as well as it was capable of being edited, and to provide guidance for those who should take up the work when he was no longer there to direct it. The French text of the Year Books was full of abbreviations which could not be expanded unless the forms of the language were accurately ascertained. Maitland therefore applied himself to learn whatever might be learned about them. The work was pioneer work, very minute and laborious, but for Maitland a labour of love. The men who wrote this forgotten and unexplored language were often clumsy and careless scribes. Their spelling was full of vagaries; there was no word so short but that they would spell it in several ways; through neglect of the "e" feminine they lost not entirely but very largely their sense of gender; they would murder the infinitive; they coined strange terminations out of misunderstood contractions; but they were using a living tongue to describe law that was alive; and if in some ways a fine language degenerated in the current usage of the English Courts, healthy processes were at work determining the use of words, processes which it was worth while to watch with some narrowness, for if thought fashions language, language in turn reacts upon thought.