Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 5.djvu/271

THE JURT AND ITS DE VEL OPMEN T. 2 $$ older men chosen by both sides (ex utraque parte), excepting that none should belong to the Abbey. At this assembly the jury were separated (congregati . . . universi, et segregati qui jurarent), and they differed — the Wallingford men swearing that there was only a market for bread and ale, the Oxford men for more things, but not a full market ; and the men of the county, that it was a full market, with possibly one exception. The Earl of Leicester, who presided (qui justitia et judex aderat), was unwilling to give judgment on these differing statements, but reported matters to the king, adding the information that he himself had lived at Abingdon when he was a boy, and that he had seen a full market there in the time of King Henry I. This satisfied the king (tanti viri testimonio delectatus), and he decided in favor of the defendant. (c) But we had better leave now these unauthoritative re- ports of the chroniclers 1 and wait, as regards cases, until solid ground is reached in the judicial records, half a century later. Meantime it will be profitable to consider two or three things. (i.) It is interesting to remark how the English kings, in their capacity as Dukes of Normandy, were using there this same ma- chinery. While they had brought it to England, they had also left it at home. 2 Dr. Brunner speaks of having carefully exam- ined many Norman documents of the twelfth century, little studied before and never printed, and remarks (Schw. 135) that they enable one to contradict the view that Anglo-Norman law had taken the lead and Norman law followed. Up to Glanville the English law was constantly fructified from the Norman. Henry was Duke of Normandy before he was Justiciary and then King of England. It was not, he adds, until near the end of the union between the two countries (in 1205) that England took the lead. It is not surprising, then, to find that Henry II. began the work of developing and organizing the inquisition as Duke of Nor- mandy before he came to the English throne, and as early as the 1 The chroniclers preserve many valuable documents. As regards their narratives we have to remember their bias and their ignorance of technical law, recalling Coke's warn- ing at the beginning of the third volume of his reports : " And for that it is hard for a man to report any part or branch of any art or science justly and truly which he pro- fesseth not, and impossible to make a just and true relation of any thing that he under- stands not, I pray thee beware of chronicle law," etc. 3 Brunner, Schw. 148, 207-8. ^ 5 * WALL STn EET New York