A GLANCE AT THE JURY SYSTEM. 



295 



that the person murdered was English. As this last was a task usu- 

 ally attended with great difficulty, it became the practice of the people 

 of the hundred to discover the criminal, and, when found, to accuse 

 him of the crime ; but as these accusers, when they had apprehended 

 the accused, were found liable to be prejudiced against him, the cus- 

 tom grew of choosing twelve, who might be taken, not only from the 

 hundred, but from the whole body of the county, whose functions 

 were to decide as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Under 

 the first Henry the jurors, though still witnesses, and deciding exclu- 

 sively from their own knowledge, began to be called judges — a fact 

 which seems to indicate that the office of deciding began to be recog- 

 nized as the principal part of their duty. In the following reign, Henry 

 II recognized the value of the jury system as a check upon the power 

 and rapacity of the barons ; and, consequently, in the tenth year of his 

 reign, was enacted the first legislation on record establishing the right 

 of trial by jury. In the constitutions of Clarendon, passed in that year, 

 it was provided that laymen should not be accused unless by certain 

 legal accusers, the witnesses, and that if the offenders tcere such lohom 

 no one wished or desired to accuse, that then twelve men should be 

 sworn "who should declare the truth according to their conscience." 



It is noted as a curious fact that the jury system, whose great 

 value has always been as a means of checking the encroachments of 

 the crown upon popular liberty, should thus have been first officially 

 introduced to the world as a means of strengthening the crown in its 

 endeavors to check the encroachments of others. And it may be noted 

 as an equally curious fact that the importance of the jury, as thus first 

 established, was in gaining convictions rather than in evading them. 

 Jurors, however, were still witnesses — " deciding by what they had 

 seen and heard." Indeed, it was not until the reign of Henry VI 

 (fifteenth century) that jurors were of sufficient intelligence to listen 

 to and decide upon extraneous evidence ; and not until the reign of 

 Anne (eighteenth century) that it was enacted that the want of " hun- 

 dredors " should not be a cause of challenge to the jury. 



From this brief recital it will be seen that the last stage in the 

 development of the modern jury was reached when, in the fifteenth 

 century, the jurors began to listen to the evidence of others, and ceased 

 to rely upon their own. The importance of the jury prior to this pe- 

 riod has been very much overstated. The reference to it in Magna 

 Charta does not warrant all the eloquence that has been expended 

 upon it. The events which gave rise to Magna Charta and the con- 

 dition of the people of England at that time preclude the idea that 

 the jury system owes its existence, or at any rate its place in Magna 

 Charta, to the "freedom-loving instincts of the Anglo-Saxons." A 

 proper conception of the jury itself, as it then existed, equally pre- 

 cludes the idea that it possessed the importance, even in the eyes of 

 those who obtained the charter, which people in later times have been 



