Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- 1 Jury: this palladium of our liberties, sacred and inviolate
- 2 Delivering the truth not the same as judging
- 3 Guilt and innocence a matter of conscience
- 4 ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to Henry II's revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty
- 5 Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of the wapentake?
- 6 Why promulgated at Wantage?
- 7 The twelve of the wapentake probably an institution for the Danelaw only
- 8 Conclusion
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
2 - Delivering the truth not the same as judging
from PART II - ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- 1 Jury: this palladium of our liberties, sacred and inviolate
- 2 Delivering the truth not the same as judging
- 3 Guilt and innocence a matter of conscience
- 4 ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to Henry II's revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty
- 5 Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of the wapentake?
- 6 Why promulgated at Wantage?
- 7 The twelve of the wapentake probably an institution for the Danelaw only
- 8 Conclusion
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
Not all commentators on trial by jury took so idealistic a view of that institution as Blackstone. Pope, with characteristic cynicisms whenever he adverted to some hallowed organization of supposed virtue, enshrined his doubts in the oft-quoted couplet:
The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign,
And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine;
a couplet in which Pope, in fact, ascribes to the judges of his time a greater concern for the welfare of jurymen than seems warranted, makes it appear, mistakenly, that judge and jury are acting together as if a combined magistracy operating against the interests of the accused, the wretches.
The scholarly, juridical perception of the fundamental distinction between iudicia facere and recognoscere veritatem has a long history. In the nineteenth century Brunner, in his earlier study of Carolingian law, had mentioned the terminological imprecision that blurred the distinction: ‘The factual distinction between “declaring the truth” and “declaring the law” was not strictly adhered to in expression.’ For this blurring of a fundamental legal distinction he has a reference to Jacob Grimm, by the 1860s the Altmeister of the study of Germanic Antiquity; veritatem dicere is shown in Carolingian documentary use in support of Grimm's distinction between, on the one hand, ‘das abgelegte gültige zeugnis entschied die sache’ (the valid testification decided the charge) and ‘der zeuge indem er die wahrheit sagte’ (the witness in delivering the truth), and on the other hand, “urtheilend” (judging):
This throws light on a conjunction between those judging and those testifying, which is unmistakable especially in the earliest period when there were no permanent Schöffen. In such cases truth de facto and truth in law were the same.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 123 - 128Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000