Of all the tasks that have fallen to me ex officio, as Master of Trinity Hall, none has been at once so agreeable and so intellectually stimulating as that of presiding at the Conference organized by the College, in September 1988, to mark the centenary of the death of my illustrious predecessor, Sir Henry Maine, Master of the College from 1877 to 1888.

Like all academics, I have been to many conferences in my time. But I cannot recall ever having attended one which was as completely and as genuinely interdisciplinary as the Trinity Hall Henry Maine Centenary Conference, the proceedings of which are published in this volume. It was unique, in my experience, in that not only did all the participants attend all the sessions and contribute knowledgeably to the discussion of one another's papers, but the same general themes constantly recurred throughout the Conference and proved to be equally relevant to the present-day concerns of all the disciplines represented. It was a particularly convincing demonstration of the continued fecundity of Maine's ideas in what are normally thought of as separate scholarly fields: legal history, political science, sociological theory, the history of ideas, anthropology and linguistics.

This aspect of the Conference is emphasized by Alan Diamond in his editorial Introduction and need not be developed further here.