century. The more common practice was the one they followed for the rest of
that session. After those opening cases in December 1678 the Middlesex jury
tried eight accused offenders one after the other and then retired to find verdicts
on them all in a room set aside for the purpose.^30 While they were out, five pris-
oners were tried to the London jury, and when they retired in turn, the Middle-
sex jury took up the trial of the next batch of arraigned prisoners from the
county. And so they went on, alternating through the session, each hearing a
group of cases—as many as nine, involving eleven accused, in one of the Mid-
dlesex batches—and then retiring briefly before returning to announce their
verdicts, which they did as soon as they were agreed, interrupting the procedure
if necessary. The possibility that the jury would confuse one defendant with an-
other was at least minimized by each prisoner being required to answer to his
name and hold up his hand as his trial began and the jury being told by the clerk
of assize: ‘Look upon the Prisoner, you that have been sworn, and hearken to his
cause.’ When they left the court to deliberate they were provided with a list of
the defendants’ names. And when they returned, each prisoner was again asked
to stand and acknowledge his name before a verdict was rendered.^31
Leaving the courtroom to deliberate was a long-established practice, the
principal purpose of which had not been to ensure careful deliberation, but to
expedite the business of the court. At the provincial assizes, that form of jury de-
liberation was disappearing by the second half of the seventeenth century. James
Cockburn has shown that on the Home Circuit the established practice had
been for the assize courts to constitute a series of juries, each of which heard a
batch of cases, left the court to deliberate, and then was essentially excused from
further service once its verdicts had been reported. Since individual jurors were
not often asked to return to a subsequent panel, this procedure required that a
large number of men be called for service. It seems likely that it was the difficulty
of finding a sufficient number of acceptable jurors—men reconciled to the new
republican regime, or at least willing to co-operate to the extent of seeing that
the courts continued to function—that explains why, in 1650 , apparently on
orders from the Rump Parliament, the sheriffs on the Home Circuit began to
call many fewer jurors, with the result that each man was required to serve on
several successive juries. In those circumstances, it was difficult to maintain the
practice of one jury hearing a batch of cases and then leaving the courtroom to
deliberate. The consequence was that, at some point after 1650 , the Home Cir-
cuit assize juries adopted the practice of deliberating and reaching their verdicts
in court, at the conclusion of each case, rather than leaving to consider several
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 271(^30) The trial jury room was presumably shared in turn by the Middlesex and City jurors. The City
grand jury also had a room set aside for their deliberations at the Old Bailey (Rep 121 , fo. 80 ). For the pro-
vision of rooms to which juries in the borough courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might
retire to consider their verdicts, see Robert Tittler, ‘The Sequestration ofJuries in Early Modern
England’, Historical Research, 61 ( 1988 ), 301 – 5.
(^31) The Office of the Clerk of Assize( 1682 ), 39 – 49.