evidence about the wealth and occupations of a considerable proportion of the
jurors who served in the City. The returns on these taxes reveal that more than
80 per cent of the jurors sworn in 1692 paid tax above the basic level and were
thus drawn from the upper third of the male householders of the City. They
were overwhelmingly shopkeepers, tradesmen, and artisans, whose worth was
assessed at more than three hundred pounds, or merchants, gentlemen, and
professionals.^23
The picture that emerges from the data suggests that while the wealthiest of
the men chosen for jury service tended to congregate on the grand jury, there
was no sharp social division between the two juries in the City. More than
90 per cent of the men who sat on the grand juries of the 1690 s paid the surtax;
42 per cent were assessed for property with an annual value of forty pounds or
more; 80 per cent were in wholesale or retail trade. In each case, these
indicators of wealth and standing place them higher up the social scale than the
men who sat on the trial jury at the Old Bailey, who were more likely to be in
manufacturing or skilled trades and likely to have less in the way of assessed
wealth. Men with the highest assessed levels of real estate—a list that includes
linen drapers and haberdashers from Cornhill, as well as booksellers and
merchants—were more likely to sit on the grand than a trial jury: the top twenty
such jurors were together sworn thirty-one times on the City grand jury in the
1690 s, twelve times on the sessions trial jury, and only five times on the trial jury
at the Old Bailey.^24 Assessed wealth, of course, is likely to have been in part a
function of age. The age of jurors was not recorded in this period, but it seems
entirely possible that grand jurors were older and more experienced as a group
than those who sat on the trial juries.
There seems to have been an understandable preference on the part of these
wealthier (and possibly older) men for the comparative dignity of the grand jury
room, or at least for the sessions of the peace, over the bustle and anxiety and
stench of the Old Bailey courtroom. The sharp divisions that appeared at the
county assizes in this period were not, however, evident in London. Some of the
wealthiest men also served on trial juries, even at the Old Bailey; and a signifi-
cant number of artisans whose assessed real estate placed them towards the bot-
tom of the list sat on the grand juries along with merchants and prosperous linen
drapers from Cornhill. All the London juries, at Guildhall and the Old Bailey,
were dominated by men from the broad middling ranks of the City, from a wide
spectrum of the property owning and employing class—a significant point
when one remembers that many of the accused brought before such juries were
charged with theft from employers or from shops and warehouses and other
places of business.
268 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^23) Based on analysis of the 271 men sworn to jury service in 1692 who can be found in the surviving
returns of the tax gathered that year.
(^24) Beattie, ‘London Juries in the 1690 s’, 243 – 4.