INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines developments in relation to the laymen who played their parts, in and out of court, in the administration of the law by the city of London. The reason for examining these developments is that the character of tribunals inevitably owes a fair amount to the character of its presiding judges, and the nature and quality of the judgments will be affected both by the judges and by anyone else who is involved in arriving at those judgments. If city judges differed in their backgrounds, attitudes and practices from the Westminster judges, and indeed also from those in other inferior courts, the city courts themselves are likely to have differed from other courts. Jurors, too, were judges of a sort in some instances: judges of the fact. Given the prominent place accorded to the jury in the history of the common law, the composition of city juries during the Middle Ages warrants detailed examination. And, as we have seen, the jury as a method of trial also occupied a fairly prominent position in the city courts. Litigants can also affect the character and workings of a court. Their influence is not always as obvious as that of judges and juries. In our period, however, when both courts and laws were developing, often at local level, litigants almost certainly affected that development.