jury of twelve men had to be chosen from another panel of sixty summoned to
attend on the first morning. Three juries thus had to be raised in the City of
London eight times a year: two trial juries of twelve, and a grand jury which
normally consisted of seventeen men.
The grand jury met at both the Guildhall and in the sessions house in the Old
Bailey in rooms assigned for the purpose and, case by case as the indictments
were drawn, heard a stream of prosecutors and their witnesses lay out the evi-
dence they would present in court, on the basis of which they either threw out
the charge or endorsed it as a ‘true bill’ and sent it to be tried before the trial jury.
When that work was concluded, the grand jury went on to its second task of
drawing up a ‘presentment’ to lay before the magistrates. The grand jurors gen-
erally finished their work well before the end of the session, and that may have
added to the attraction of such service for men who inevitably lost time from
work when they were summoned for jury duty. Certainly, grand jurors were less
troubled in this respect than those who served on the other juries, for one of the
striking characteristics of the trial of criminal offences in London in this period
—both at the sessions of the peace and the Old Bailey—was that the same
twelve trial jurors normally served through the entire session, whether that
lasted one day or five, and dealt with twenty or a hundred cases. This practice
was encouraged by the need for expedition, and was presumably made possible
by the jurors’ being able to return home at night and so avoid the expenses for
lodging and food that many jurors at the county quarter sessions and assizes
would have faced. Dependence on a single trial jury was also made possible by
the structure of the Old Bailey sessions and the way juries deliberated in finding
their verdicts.
As we have seen, the defendants at the Old Bailey were arraigned and tried in
alternating batches. A group of City prisoners would be tried one after the other
to the City jury, and when the last case was completed the jury retired from the
court to deliberate and find their verdicts on all of them.^15 While they were out,
a batch of Middlesex prisoners would be arraigned and tried to a separate jury
from the county. At some convenient point, the London jury returned to the
court to report their verdicts, and to take up another batch of arraigned prison-
ers when the Middlesex jury in their turn retired to deliberate. So the session
continued, with juries alternating in hearing cases and finding verdicts. That so
few men made so many crucial decisions so quickly makes it particularly
important to discover who the jurors were.
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 265Legal Literature(Newcastle upon Tyne, 1982 ), 403 – 6. The City grand jury was not charged by the recorder
or the mayor either at the session of the peace at Guildhall or at the Old Bailey: at least there are no such
charges in print. The Middlesex and Westminster grand juries, on the other hand, were charged at the
opening of their comparable sessions by the chairmen of the magistrates. Many of those charges were
subsequently printed through the eighteenth century and are among the best examples of the genre; sev-
eral are included in the collection edited by Georges Lamoine, Charges to the Grand Jury, 1689 – 1803 ,
Camden Society, 4 th ser., 43 ( 1992 ).
(^15) See below, pp. 270 – 1.