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
5 - Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of the wapentake?
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
It appears that for a considerable time now the Proto-Germanic origin of trial by jury has been insisted on less than long ago, and that bulwark of English liberty cannot be comfortably traced back to Anglo-Saxon times, nor, of course, to the statecraft of Alfred the Great to whom it was once so readily ascribed. Perhaps it is wiser to say that one knows what, at various times in the history of legal historiography, the scholarly consensus has been on the origin of trial by jury, than that one knows what the facts are. That is how Sir Frank Stenton sums it up with his usual care:
In spite of the vague reporting of early pleas, it is clear that the Norman kings established the jury as a regular part of the machinery of English government. In the opinion of most scholars the jury was introduced into England as a Norman institution, ultimately derived from the sworn inquests which the later Carolingian sovereigns had used for the determination of their rights. That the jury, in this sense, had been known to the early Norman dukes is possible, though it has not yet been proved. On the other hand the ‘twelve leading thegns’ of the wapentake, who swore that they would neither protect the guilty nor accuse the innocent, were members of a society which had grasped the essential principle of the jury seventy years before the Norman Conquest.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 136 - 139Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000