It is fitting for a lecturer to pay his tribute to the man under whose auspices, so to speak, he lectures. That sometimes is a difficult matter, requiring the closing of an eye to many things, but in this case I am happily absolved from any such necessity, for there can be no doubt that Maitland was a man of genius. I hardly need say this in Cambridge, or in any other place where scholars come together, for his reputation has been long and securely established. It is now more than half a century since his death, and longer since his books were written, yet they are today more widely read than ever. The intensive researches of the last fifty years have made only the smallest alterations in the conclusions they reached. He himself was perhaps not quite as sure of them as we are. The most honest of men, he was always careful to reveal his doubts, and it is to a subject on which he had many doubts that I address myself today. I shall talk about the ownership and heritability of land in the twelfth century, in other words, about the emergence of the fee simple as an estate in land. I shall begin by setting before you Maitland's own account.

The meetings of the American Bar Association held in London in 1957 furnished an incidental but valuable opportunity to inquire into the methods of English legislative draftsmanship and to make some useful comparisons with its counterpart in Washington.

The first striking fact that emerges in such a comparison is that almost all the public laws enacted by Parliament are drafted by one small group of men, the expert draftsmen of the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in Washington, where legislation is prepared by the Offices of the Legislative Counsel of the House and Senate, by members of the professional staffs of the many standing and special committees of Congress, by the legal staffs of the executive departments and agencies, and even by members of the public. Since this aggregate is very large, the question immediately arises: Why so few and so concentrated in London and why so many and so dispersed in Washington?

One obvious explanation would seem to be that the greater size and complexity of the United States must inevitably result in a larger number of, and more difficult, legislative problems, too large for any single drafting group to handle. But even a cursory examination of the recent statute books shows a physical volume of English public laws quite comparable to that appearing during the same period in the Federal Statutes at Large.

Some of the complexity of the English rules of evidence in criminal cases springs from a clash, probably dating back to the formative period of those rules, between two objects, laudable in themselves but antagonistic. One most fundamental principle, of which English lawyers are justly proud, stemming from a desire that a criminal trial should be conducted in a manner as fair to the accused as possible, was that evidence of his misdoings on other occasions should be prima facie inadmissible. On the other hand, courts of justice naturally desire that cogent and weighty evidence that the accused committed the crime with which he is charged should not be excluded from consideration by judge and jury, and consequently evidence, often called similar fact evidence, of other misconduct of the accused is sometimes receivable not because it shows his bad character but in spite of that fact.