323 The Period of Constitution
jury; but of course most important here and for the
whole of procedure were the juries: the trial juries in
criminal cases after 1215 normally groups of forty-four
men, largely a second job for the presenting juries; the
grand-assize juries which must pass on the most solemn
questions of best right to land or to patronage; the
incessantly used juries in the four petty assizes every one
of which must make a view of the property in question, a
view often detailed and difficult, juries of whom unanim-
ity was already required and obtained often by the use
of additional men through the process of afforcing, juries
subject to attaint and punishment by appeal to a new
jury of twenty-four knights; and besides these established
uses, the jury was already making its way through volun-
tary choice of the litigants into the criminal cases begun
by appeal and into the forty to fifty civil actions then in
use, several of which involved view; and there were juries,
specially treated juries, in those Bills in Eyre which cu-
riously foreshadowed the equitable jurisdiction of the
Court of Chancery. Fourth, in final process, were often
juries to make extents of lands or rents as basis of remit-
tance or acknowledgment of one party to another, to
survey questionable boundaries at the end of a writ-of-
right case, juries to assess damages when such were
awarded as a subsidiary remedy, and the endless juries
for affeering (i. e. assessing) the amercements in the
king's court and in the courts of county, tourn, and
manor; and there were knights who bore the record from
county courts to Westminster when a case was carried
up through writ of false judgment.
This has been merely to name the leading uses, or
rather groups of uses, of the people in some way con-
nected with legal procedure. There were something
over eighty of such uses at this time, and two of them,
summons and pledge, were employed in from fifty to
sixty different ways. Taking England over, some of
these, as suit of court, summons, pledge, essoin, assize
juries, affeering juries, must have occurred thousands of