Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 5.djvu/61

45 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. VOL. V. MAY 15, 1891. No. 2. THE OLDER MODES OF TRIAL WHEN the Normans came into England they brought with them, not only a far more vigorous and searching kingly power than had been known there, but also a certain product of the exercise of this power by the Frankish kings and the Norman dukes; namely, the use of the inquisition in public administration, i.e., the practice of ascertaining facts by summoning together by public authority a number of people most likely, as being neigh- bors, to know and tell the truth, and calling for their answer under oath. This was the parent of the modern jury. In so far as the business of judicature was then carried on under royal authority it was simply so much public administration, and the use of the inquisition came to England as an established, although undevel- oped, part of the machinery for doing all sorts of public business. With the Normans came also another novelty, the judicial duel — one of the chief methods for determining controversies in the royal courts ; and it was largely the cost, danger, and unpopular- ity of the last of these institutions which fed the wonderful growth of the other. The Normans brought to England much else, and found that much of what they brought was there already; for the Anglo- Saxons were their cousins of the Germanic race, and had, in a great degree, the same legal conceptions and methods, only less worked out. Looking now at these and at the Norman additions, what were the English modes of trying questions of fact when the jury came in, and how did they develop and die out? Some