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A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury, At the Sessions of the Peace Held for the City and Liberty of Westminster, &c. On Thursday the 29th of June, 1749
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 December 2009
Extract
of our Lord the King, holden at the Town Court-House near Westminster-Hall, in and for the Liberty of the Dean and Chapter of the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, Westminster, the City, Borough, and Town of Westminster, in the County of Middlesex, and St. Martin le Grand, London, on Thursday the Twentyninth Day of June, in the Twenty-third Tear of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord George the Second, King of Great-Britain, &c. before Henry Fielding, Esq; the Right Hon. George Lord Carpenter, Sir John Crosse, Baronet, George Huddleston, James Crofts, Gabriel Fowace, John Upton, Thomas Ellys, Thomas Smith, George Payne, William Walmsley, William Young, Peter Elers, Martin Clare, Thomas Lediard, Henry Trent, Daniel Gach, James Fraser, Esquires, and others their fellows, Justices of our said Lord the King, assigned to keep the Peace of the said Liberty, and also to hear and determine divers Felonies, Trespasses, and other Misdeeds done and committed within the said Liberty.
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- Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1992
References
page 327 note 1 It is not easy to assign a precise origin to the institution of the jury. Chambers, Lectures…, I, 103Google Scholar,: “we may still trace the Saxon institutions in the use of juries, though the forms of indictment…seem better to correspond with the…Norman practice” Stubbs, Constit. Hist., makes it a Saxon adaptation of a Norman custom, I, 313, passim; The Oxford Companion to Law, 686Google Scholar, mentions an ordinance of King Ethelred II, circa A.D. 1000, but also thinks of a Norman origin, “of a system of inquisitions in local courts by sworn witnesses.”
page 337 note 2 Also called Grand C(o)ustumier de Normandy = the book of the customs of Normandy, quoted by Sir Wm Chambers, vol. I & II.
page 330 note 1 This was evidently a purely theoretical view: English history will amply demonstrate otherwise, from the trial of Archbishop Sancroft in 1687 to the political trials of 1794.
page 332 note 1 = the reason for passing a law disappearing, the law itself disappears.
page 335 note 1 The Jacobite attempt of 1745 was still very recent, together with the threat for the dynasty. Neither was his political journalism very old.…
page 336 note 1 It is to be noted that the same argument will be used 40 years later by the supporters of the established order against the French revolutionary doctrine of liberty: see Burke and his followers.
page 337 note 1 A nuisance to the public. F. points out a state of facts: probably less than one in ten crimes, offences, etc. were actually punished, either because people did not care to report such misdeeds, because they could not attend to the lengthy process; or because they did not care to have some one hang for a trifle, or because there was no organised police force that could pursue and arrest malefactors.
page 340 note 1 This argument, of a fury after pleasures, Fielding developed again in his Enquiry into the Cause of the recent Increase of Robbers…, 1751Google Scholar. See my edition, of this text (Toulouse: P. U. M., 1989).
page 343 note 1 Cf the same image in Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III, sc. 4, the garden scene.