Sir Paul Gavrilovitch Vinogradoff

Sir Paul Gavrilovitch Vinogradoff (born Nov. 18 [Nov. 30, New Style], 1854, Kostroma, near Moscow, Russia—died Dec. 19, 1925, Paris, France) was an Anglo-Russian legal scholar and medievalist who was perhaps the greatest authority in his time on the feudal laws and customs of England.

Educated at the University of Moscow (Ph.D., 1884), Vinogradoff was appointed professor there and became active in Russian educational reform. When university authorities curtailed the students’ freedom of expression, he resigned his professorship (1902) and left Russia for England, where in 1903 he became professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. He was knighted in 1917, one year before he became a British subject.

Vinogradoff’s most important work is Villeinage in England (1892; originally published in Russian, 1887), in which he advanced the theory that the Anglo-Norman manor developed not from a society based on serfdom but from a free village community. His most ambitious work, Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence (1920–22), was incomplete at his death.