Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 114

The Crown did not feel too confident, however; the petty jury in criminal trials was a makeshift expedient and an innovation. Under the old law a prisoner could undoubtedly have been compelled to submit to the ordeal and to abide by any construction which the justices might place upon the outcome of it; but was it reasonable to compel a man to submit to trial by jury? Even the Crown felt that this was unreasonable, and it soon became customary to put the astonishing question to the prisoner whether he consented to trial by jury. If he refused to say the necessary words and “put himself upon the country” it seemed as though nothing further could be done. If such a prisoner could have spoken the language of modern constitutional law he would very likely have raised a doubt whether trial by jury in criminal cases was “due process of law”, for the time-honoured methods of trial were the ordeals, and the petty jury was a new-found device of very recent origin. Put in a quandary by a prisoner’s refusal to plead, a court could only exercise its discretion by adopting one or another of several high-handed courses. Sometimes, as we have already noted, it would cast the responsibility on a larger jury of twenty-four knights; alternatively, it might allow the prisoner to abjure the realm, even for homicide,¹ while for lesser charges a prisoner could purchase (for 20s.) the privilege of merely finding sureties.²

Towards the close of the century the Crown felt strong enough to impose jury trial by sheer force, and the Statute of Westminster I, c. 12 (1275), provided—

“that notorious felons who are openly of evil fame and who refuse to put themselves upon inquests of felony at the suit of the King¹ before his justices, shall be remanded to a hard and strong prison as befits those who refuse to abide by the common law of the land; but this is not to be understood of persons who are taken upon light suspicion.”

This statute begins with a threat and concludes with an argument; could there be any better indication of the government’s difficulty in imposing trial by jury? It is surely noteworthy that in 1275 it was found expedient to declare by statute that the petty jury was now “the common law of the land” even if the rigours of that common law were to be confined to “notorious felons”. Conservatives perhaps found comfort in the proviso that jury trial or its painful alternative was not to extend to those whose reputation was not too bad. As is well known, the words “prison forte et dure” by some unaccountable means became transformed into “peine forte et dure”, and finally into a form of torture which, by the sixteenth century, took the barbarous form of placing the accused between two boards and piling weights upon him until he accepted trial by jury or expired. Felons whose guilt was obvious sometimes heroically chose to die in this manner rather than plead, be convicted and hanged, for a prisoner who died under peine forte et dure had never been tried and never convicted, and consequently his goods and chattels could not be forfeited to the Crown. It was abolished in 1772.²