Ancient Law was one of the first books which Meyer Fortes directed me to read when I came up to Cambridge as a research student, twenty-five years ago. All Fortes’ students were supposed to read Ancient Law. This was not because Fortes himself was much interested in the history of anthropology: but so far as he was concerned, Maine was no remote ancestor, some fossil figure from the prehistory of the discipline. On the contrary, he appealed to Maine as an authority, and borrowed a number of his theoretical conceptions. Nor was he alone in this. Fortes’ great contemporary in British social anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, also treated Maine's anthropological ideas with respect, and Maine is one of the few ancestral figures to escape condemnation in Evans-Pritchard's A History of Anthropological Thought, which was published posthumously in 1981.

So far as Maine and his own contemporaries were concerned, his anthropology began and ended with his ‘Patriarchal Theory’. Neither Fortes nor Evans-Pritchard endorsed this theory, or even took it seriously, although they cited Maine's obiter dicta on kinship theory and on law. It was rather Maine's very lawyerly view of social structure which most influenced Fortes and his own mentor, Radcliffe-Brown. I shall return briefly to this ‘jural model’ (as it came to be called among anthropologists), but my central concern is with the patriarchal theory.