T HIS selection of the more outstanding of Gaillard
Lapsley's historical articles has been rendered post-
humous by his death on August 17, 1949. Ill health had
compelled him to entrust the editing of it to other hands,
and it is thus possible for us to say some things of his work
which might otherwise have gone unsaid here.

English mediaeval studies owe a long debt to G. T. Lapsley.
He published only one book, The County Palatine of Durham, ¹
which, although now half a century old, is still a model for the
treatment of the great English franchises of the middle ages; but
as a teacher and a contributor to learned reviews he exerted
profound influence over the thought of generations of historical
students, particularly the inter-war generation between 1919 and
1939.

Lapsley was born in New York City on November 14,
1871. After graduating at Harvard in 1893, he took up the
study of law, a discipline which had lasting effects on his
thought and technique, but soon abandoned it for history.
Here 'his master', as he loved to call him, was Charles Gross,
the pioneer historian of mediaeval English boroughs and their
gilds, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of English local historical
publications is reflected in that bibliography of English mediae-
val history which stands as a reproach and a challenge to the
scholars of to-day. But when Lapsley came to England in 1904
and settled down to his lifelong work as Tutor of Trinity College,
and as Lecturer and later University Reader in Constitutional
History at Cambridge, the direction of his interests shifted.
This can be attributed partly to his experience as a teacher but
also, without doubt, to the stimulus of F. W. Maitland's ideas,
the impact of which was heightened by active membership of
Maitland's own university. Thenceforward, though he still

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