[1] The civil jury of matrons was used to determine whether a recently widowed woman was pregnant with what was presumed to be her late husband's child.

By the sixteenth century, women who successfully pleaded their belly, as the practice was colloquially known, were frequently either pardoned or granted a lesser sentence, such as penal transportation.

The practice of drawing of jurors from the observers and lack of a process vetting the jurors' expertise and honesty opened the possibility of stacking the jury pool, leading one eighteenth century commentator to complain that female thieves would have "Matrons of [their] own Profession ready at hand, who, right or wrong, bring their wicked Companions quick with Child to the great Impediment of Justice.

"[7] John Gay’s The Beggar's Opera alludes to the idea that women awaiting trial or temporarily reprieved from hanging by virtue of an inaccurate diagnosis of pregnancy would sometimes attempt to conceive by their jailers in hopes of pardon.

In what was presumably an attempt to combat the practice, the law held that a woman was not entitled to a second reprieve, regardless of whether she has become pregnant a second time, even if the second fetus has quickened.