ABSTRACT
Frederic William Maitland is usually viewed as the founder of the study of English legal history. Maitland’s work deserves to be reclaimed and understood a leading work in Law and Religion studies. Maitland not only analysed the ecclesiastical law of the Church of England in the same way as he analysed the common law, but also explored the interplay between religiously-imposed and state-imposed laws. The Stubbs-Maitland debate concerns the status of catholic canon law prior to the Reformation. The ‘Stubbs-Maitland debate’ label is somewhat misleading given that the name of Maitland’s apparent adversary, Stubbs, appears only twice in the index of Roman Canon Law in the Church of England. Richard Helmholz has written that Maitland’s work identified and distinguished two ‘basic subjects’: ‘the relationship of English canonical practice to the formal canon law’ and ‘its relationship with English common law’.
