The Danes introduced the habit of making committees among the free men in court, which perhaps made England favorable ground for the future growth of the jury system out of a Frankish custom later introduced by the Normans.The English king Æthelred the Unready issued a legal code at Wantage, which states that the twelve leading thegns (minor nobles) of each wapentake (a small district) were required to swear that they would investigate crimes without bias.
The same year, trial by jury became a fairly explicit right in one of the most influential clauses of Magna Carta, signed by King John.
[2] Medieval juries were self-informing, in that individuals were chosen as jurors because they either knew the parties and the facts, or they had the duty to discover them.
For who durst set himself in opposition to the crown and ministry, or aspire to the character of being a patron of freedom, while exposed to so arbitrary a jurisdiction?
And as the practice was anciently common of fining, imprisoning, or otherwise punishing the jurors, merely at the discretion of the court, for finding a verdict contrary to the direction of these dependent judges; it is obvious, that juries were then no manner of security to the liberty of the subject.The first paragraph of the Act that abolished the Star Chamber, long a bone of contention between the early Stuart kings and a significant fraction of their subjects, on 5 July 1641 repeats the clause on the right of a citizen to be judged by his peers: Abolition of the Star Chamber An act for the regulating of the privy council, and for taking away the court commonly called the star-chamber.
WHEREAS by the great charter many times confirmed in parliament, it is enacted, That no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed, and that the King will not pass upon him, or condemn him; but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land ...Many English colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies, which later became the United States, adopted the jury trial system.
At the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey), which heard the most serious trials in the country, the average jury seated between 1923 and 1926 included between 2.0 and 2.5 women.
[7] At the local Quarter Sessions courts, which tried minor offences such as theft, the percentage of women on the jury throughout the 1920s and 1930s has been observed at between 10 and 25% in various towns.
All three of these aspects of jury service were felt to disproportionately exclude women, and organised opposition to these rules continued until the eventual abolition of the property qualifications in the 1970s.
[9] More recent historical work has shown how the property qualifications did serve to exclude many women from jury service, as these feminist campaigning groups had argued.
[10] But other work has called into question the significance of challenges to individual jurors by the parties' lawyers, and of judges ordering single-sex juries.
Crosby has concluded that the most significant element in determining how many women undertook jury service was therefore the series of decisions local officials took about who to summon in the first place.