Maitland's contribution to parliamentary history consisted in the editing of the _Parliament Roll_ for 1305. Of the vivid and picturesque interest of the petitions printed in that volume much might be written, for nowhere else can we gain so full and comprehensive a notion of the miscellaneous transactions and aspirations which came under the purview of a Parliament in the very early stages of its existence. But apart from this the volume is important as furnishing a closer and more accurate view of the evolution of parliament than had previously been obtainable. All readers of Stubbs' _Constitutional History_ are familiar with "the model Parliament of 1295." We are accustomed to think of that date as marking an epoch at which government by a Parliament of Three Estates is definitely secured, and as, in a certain sense, the close of the formative period of parliamentary institutions. It is true that Parliament is not yet divided into Lords and Commons, and that procedure by Bill is in the distant future. Still we have been wont to regard a Parliament as being throughout the fourteenth century a definite well-recognised institution, distinct from the King's Council and implying the presence of representatives from shire and borough. Maitland's preface to the _Memoranda de Parliamento_ showed that such an impression should be modified. Ten years after the Model Parliament practice and nomenclature were still fluid. There was no distinction between Parliament and Council; the word _Parliamentum_ is never found in the nominative; any solemn session of the Kings Council might be termed a Parliament. The business too, transacted at these great inquests, was for the most part administrative and judicial, conducted through the examination and endorsement of petitions. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, despite the exploits of the English Justinian, we were still far from a legislature composed of the Three Estates.
Meanwhile, in a profusion of articles, Maitland was correcting old mistakes and throwing out pregnant suggestions in many departments of legal theory. The principal ideas which are to be found not only in his work upon the _History of Law_ but in his subsequent speculations on Corporateness and Communalism were already in his mind during the early days of work at Downing. In his lectures on Constitutional History, delivered in 1888, he gave a description of English medieval land-tenure which substantially corresponds to the more complete exposition of the _History_ in 1895, and had already hit upon that comparison between the course of feudal land-law in England and Germany, which runs, a brilliant shaft of illumination, through his whole treatment of the subject. In Bracton's explanation that the rector of a parish church is debarred from a writ of right his keen eye had detected, as early as 1891, "the nascent law about corporations aggregate and corporations sole."
