Law Courts 159
jury regular In Ms courts, Henry instructed Ms Justices In
these words:
Moreover the lord Mug wills that those who make their
law [i. e. go through the ordeal\ and are quit thereby, if they
have a very bad reputation and are publicly and scandalously
decried on the testimony of many lawful men, shall forswear
the king's lands, to the effect that within eight days they
shall cross the sea unless the wind detain them; and with
the first wind which they have thereafter they shall cross the
sea, and they shall never return to England unless by the
grace of the lord king; and there let them be outlaws, and
if they return let them be taken as outlaws.1
This not only showed dissatisfaction with the ordeal,
but gave a hint of what might take its place; it was be-
cause a man's neighbours believed in his guilt that he was
to be banished; and, when neighbours were regularly and
formally summoned to state the facts, there was a trial
jury in criminal cases.
It is impossible to give a detailed account of how the
new procedure grew. Our knowledge of how criminal ac-
tions were conducted in the late twelfth and early thir-
teenth centuries is scanty. But this was the time of jury
growth; the simple but adaptable inquest machinery was
being used by the king for innumerable purposes, and it
would have been strange if some form of it had not finally
met the new want which was felt in the criminal procedure.
1 Article 14 of tlie Assize of Clarendon. Men so dealt with were not
technically convicted—those convicted by failure in the ordeal were muti-
lated—but Henry was in effect saying that he was wholly sceptical of
the ordeal as revealing God's will and that men regarded as criminals by
their neighbours were better out of the country. After ten years' experi-
ence in dealing with criminals in his courts, Henry repeated this provision
in substance in the first article of the Assize of Northampton. See A. and
S.f document 16, and W. and N., pp. 56, 57.^ William Rufus had been
equally sceptical about the ordeal, but he did nothing constructive in
the way of supplementing or displacing it. "What's that?" cried Wil-
liam, when he heard of certain men who had escaped by the ordeal. '' God
is a just judge? Perish him who henceforth believes it. In the future let
men be answerable to me, not to God." Eadmer, Historia Nowrunt in
Anglia, p. 102.