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I. Stubbs Seventy Years after

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

Helen Cam
Helen Cam
Affiliation:
Fellow of Girton College and Lecturer in the University
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Extract

Seventy-five years ago the Clarendon press published the first volume of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Developments, and its third volume came out in 1878. Those of us in Cambridge who have been responsible for the list of books recommended to the attention of the students of medieval constitutional history have of set purpose placed Stubbs’ book in the category of those recommended for ‘study’—a category in which no other secondary history book is to be found. It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it, and this article, is an attempt to justify that opinion, whilst indicating, as far as may be, the directions in which the results of seventy years ‘research and reinterpretation have supplemented Stubbs’ knowledge and modified our attitude to his judgements. I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history. As one who loves Maitland this side idolatry, I can only accept Professor Galbraith's opinion that Maitland's learning fell far short of that of Stubbs—as Maitland himself would have been the first to declare. ‘In the augmentation of knowledge’, he said, ‘Dr Stubbs stood supreme. No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , 1948 , pp. 129 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1948

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