The evidence of the tax categories and occupations of the jurors who served
in 1692 is confirmed by the more general evidence of the place of residence of all
the jurors sworn on the three City juries in the eight years 1692 – 9. More than
2,500men sat on the juries in those years: despite large differences in ward popu-
lations, the largest number came from the older, least populous, but much
richer, wards at the centre of the City—almost certainly the result of deliberate
selection.^25 In addition, in the pool of men summoned for jury duty, the richest
among them were called more often than those less wealthy; and on the juries
chosen to serve when the courts convened, there was a similar tendency for the
wealthiest of those who responded actually to be selected.^26 If the late seven-
teenth-century juries rarely included large numbers of the truly rich, and never
the truly poor, they were drawn from men well within the upper third of the
population, men with a strong interest in both their property and the existing
social order.^27
It was also characteristic of jurymen in this period that they were drawn from
that class of men who engaged most commonly in other aspects of the govern-
ment of their communities—of their parish and precinct, their ward and the
City itself. In the ward of Cornhill, for example, the wardmote inquest book
reveals that fully 80 per cent of the men who served on the criminal juries in the
1690 s also held another office in that decade, including eleven men who sat on
the Common Council of the City, and others who acted in their parishes as con-
stables, churchwardens, overseers, and collectors of the poor. Cornhill was not
unusual in that regard. At least 200 of the City jurors we have identified also
served on the Common Council at some point, seventy of them while they were
on the juries. Jurymen were thus not impartial citizens, randomly chosen, but at
least to some extent a self-selecting and active group of men who were likely to
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 269(^25) Ibid., 231 – 1 , tables 8 .1, 8. 2. (^26) Ibid., 244 – 8.
(^27) Jurors at the county assizes and quarter sessions in the late eighteenth century were composed
overwhelmingly of men drawn from similar social groups, though Hay places the jurors of Staffordshire
and Northamptonshire slightly higher in the upper range of income and status (King, ‘ “Illiterate Ple-
beians, Easily Misled”, in Cockburn and Green (eds.), Twelve Good Men and True, 266‒74; Hay, ‘Class
Composition of the Palladium of Liberty’, ibid., 325‒43). There were complaints from time to time, it is
true, that jurors were being returned ‘of meane ranke and very insufficient for that service’, as was said
in 1677 —complaints about their ability to find satisfactory verdicts. Much of this was blamed on the cor-
ruption of the returning officers, on their willingness to take bribes to excuse men from service (Rep 82 ,
fos. 98, 135, 260). As a result of complaints in 1691 about the ‘inability’ of the persons returned to juries,
the Court of Aldermen ordered that the secondaries make lists of eligible inhabitants, and that the al-
dermen ensure that the names of ‘discreet and substantial men’ were included. They also ordered the
town clerk to keep a record of jurors who were summoned and failed to appear (Rep 95 , fos. 215, 227,
259 ). Some of the concerns expressed in the late seventeenth century about the quality and character of
jurors extended to those called to the sessions of the peace and gaol delivery. But the most persistent com-
plaints of this kind seem to have been directed against those named by the wardmote inquests for jury
service at the minor (though important) civil courts in the City—the courts of the lord mayor and the
sheriffs—who had to meet a lower property qualification and whose judgments could be deeply irritat-
ing for propertied men in the City (CLRO, Misc. MSS 38. 25 ; Rep 113 , pp. 315 – 16 ). Criticism of jurors in
this period was mainly directed at those who served in those minor civil courts, rather than at the sessions
and gaol delivery. There was little overlap in personnel between the two bodies.