Launcelot Sharpe, one of the masters in Merchant Taylors' School; and on 7 October 1809 Maitland was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge,[2] and about the same time he entered at the Inner Temple with the intention of going to the bar.
His estate included a large library behind him, and Maitland undertook to catalogue it, on condition of receiving the duplicates as his reward.
On 27 June 1821 he was admitted to deacon's orders at Norwich by Bishop Henry Bathurst, and licensed to the curacy of St. Edmund in the city; the rector of the parish, the Rev.
Maitland did not stay long at Norwich, and was admitted to priest's orders by Henry Ryder, Bishop of Gloucester.
[1] In 1838 Archbishop William Howley appointed Maitland librarian and keeper of the manuscripts at Lambeth Palace.
Maitland had incurred the dislike of the Evangelical party by attacks on their leaders, and merciless criticism of Joseph Milner, John Foxe, and others.
He was an active supporter of William Thoms, when Notes and Queries was first started, and a frequent contributor to the earlier volumes, sometimes under the signature of "Rufus".
[1] In 1817 Maitland published his first pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Primary Objects of Idolatrous Worship, unfashionably against Jacob Bryant's writings.
[1] In 1826 Maitland put forth a pamphlet which he called An Enquiry into the Grounds on which the Prophetic Period of Daniel and St. John has been supposed to consist of 1260 Years.
One of the side issues in the controversy turned on the question of the Catholic orthodoxy, or alleged Protestantism, of the Albigenses and the Waldenses; Joseph Milner, in his Church History, had claimed them as among the "Heavenly Witnesses" during the Middle Ages.
Maitland in 1832 published, in a volume of 546 pages, his most elaborate work entitled Facts and Documents illustrative of the History, Doctrine, and Rites of the ancient Albigenses and Waldenses.
Between him and Maitland, a friendship had grown, and at Rose's suggestion the articles collected in two volumes, as The Dark Ages: a Series of Essays intended to illustrate the State of Religion and Literature in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Centuries (1844), and Essays on Subjects connected with the Reformation in England (1849).
Carefully reprinted from the original edition by Thomas Savill, dwelling in St. Martin's Lane, Westminster, 1842, 16 pp.