Law Courts 165
or the older ordeals; there was little disposition to ask
how the jury reached its unanimous answer. It was
usually quickly reached; it was the "voice of the country";
the litigants had placed themselves upon the country; it
was what was wished. The jurors drawn from a limited
district, the neighbours of the parties to the suit, embodied
in themselves when they came into court something that
would have seemed more valuable to the courtf could the
comparison have been made, than the product of a ra-
tional taking and weighing of evidence. The fact that
the jury reached its verdict in its own way and returned
a complete and final answer shows that there was likely
to be at least a slight judging element in what it did.
Moreover the jurors were not to be content with the
knowledge of the facts which they happened to have when
summoned; they were expected to make inquiries and
inform themselves as best they could before coming into
court. This entailed some weighing and judging of evi-
dence. They were not mechanical transmitters of fact
like modern witnesses, but were embryonic "judges of
fact" from the first. Moreover, it should be remembered
that at that early time there were scarcely judges, in any
modern sense, in some courts where the jury was used.
The assembly still judged. The jury was a part of the
assembly, put under oath for a specific informing-judg-
ing job. It was not so much, as it would have been later,
an alternative between a professional judge and a group
of citizens, but rather between groups, or between a
whole group and part of it. Even the king's justices were
often more presiding officers than judges—seeing that the
courts did things according to new methods grafted on the
old. Thus for this reason also, the early establishment of
the English jury as a regular part of procedure was deter-
mining its character.
Upon these characteristics depended the triumph, in
the course of the fourteenth century, of the principle of
unanimity in the jury. Its early position as one among
several kinds of proof tended to make it like them; if