G. R. Elton as a Legal Historian

‘I AM not’, Geoffrey Elton insisted, ‘I am not a legal historian.’ The provenance of this solemn denial is curious. Elton was giving a lecture in the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn to the Selden Society, the pre-eminent learned society for the study of legal history in England, in 1978. He had been invited to join its Council in the previous year, and was to preside over the Society from 1982 to 1985. Even from that eminence, writing his study of F.W.Maitland, Elton persisted in his earlier denial: he was not ‘a historian of law’. Manifestly this was not an opinion shared by his colleagues in the Selden Society who invited him to lecture in 1978, and elected him to their presidency five years later. And it is certainly easy to discount Elton's denial as a false modesty. He was the mentor of a cadre of distinguished scholars whose work, more obviously than his own, centred on the study of courts, legal procedures or doctrines. He had emphasised in all his writings that those historians—particularly thosesocialhistorians—who had plundered the rich records generated by the courts, were obliged to recognise that the ‘stifling formality’ of the latter could conceal essential issues, and badly mislead the neophyte. ‘Critical analysis of the available sources’ was imperative; ‘only a precise knowledge of the machinery can really unlock the meaning of the record’. And, most important, Elton was a distinguished historian in his own right of an instrument of critical importance, one of the three Maine modes of juridical change, for constitutional and legal development and innovation: he was a preeminent student of legislation, more specifically, of parliamentary statute.