Development of Trial by Jury. " the Bishops : so they will hinder my marrying? Well, let 'em, but I'll be revenged. I'll buy two or three acres of ground, and by God, I'll under-bury them all!" His conviction made void some fourteen hundred marriages. In the Fleet Prison he amused himself by sending out an appeal "To the Compassionate," stating that in his
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prime he had given away the greater part of his income to the needy. The last Fleet wedding came off in July, 1840, when a debtor, aged seventy-six, a prisoner for fifteen years, was married to a lady of sixty-two in St. Bride's Church. Farringdon street was crowded with specta tors, but among them all was not a plyer or a marriage-house keeper.
DEVELOPMENT OF TRIAL BY JURY. BV E. C. Lawrence. IF we trace the history of legal development from the earliest custom of our remote ancestors to the latest statutory enactment of our refined society, we shall find no subject which has had more influence in shaping our legal conceptions of justice; no subject to which we may ever return with zealous study and which will afford us more benefit and general information than that English insti tution, the trial by jury. Of its origin we can say that it was of great antiquity. We find a record of its use among the early Greeks and Romans. In Rome we see a number of justices, with a judge at the head as advisor, hearing and deciding of the innocence or guilt of a sus pected person. But this Roman jury, as well as the still earlier Greek jury, if we may call it such, was in scarcely any respect, in form or duties, like the jury of our own time, and the earliest authentic record of the use of the jury, in the form which it was later to assume, is found in the early writings of the nations of northern Europe. It was there a royal institution, and was employed by the Frankish kings to determine local customs, the conduct of royal officers, and ascertain the existence of any crime which might be construed to threaten the King's peace. This was the Frankish inquest, which
we find in use as early as the ninth century. By it the rulers placed themselves outside and above the then existing custom of trial by ordeal and oath with oath-helpers. They were able to learn exact facts, and were not compelled to submit to those earlier and un satisfactory tests. It seems, however, to be a somewhat mooted question as to whether the English trial by jury is a direct descendant of the Frankish inquest or not. It was but natural that the early rulers, of whatever people, should have sought to obtain information from trusted men regarding their rights and duties; regarding the local customs in which they had an interest; regarding the occur rence of crime; and this we find to be the case. We find it in the Nustria which the Normans were invading in the tenth century. We find a record of it in the Scandinavian law books, and yet a knowledge of these things does not seem to disturb our confi dence in its derivation from the Frankish in quest. It is said that the Anglo-Saxon dooms do not give us a clue to it, and it is also said that the jury were not evolved from the doomsmen of earlier times. A judgment of the doomsmen was a very different thing from the sworn verdict of the jury. " It may be possible," says an eminent historian, "to
