jury are today measured in days and weeks, if not months, a trial in 1700 would be
measured in minutes, only occasionally in hours, never in days. An unusually de-
tailed printed account of the Old Bailey session ofDecember 1678 enabled John
Langbein to establish that in a two-day sitting on the eleventh and twelfth of that
month, beginning at 9 a.m. each day and, after a break (at a time unspecified, but
perhaps 1 p.m.), continuing at 3 p.m. and into the evening, the court tried thirty-
two cases, involving thirty-six accused. After the commissions were read and other
essential preliminaries were completed, the jury found verdicts in twelve cases on
the first day, twenty on the second. Some of those trials involved relatively petty
thefts. But the calendar at that session also included charges of rape, murder, burg-
lary, and horse-theft—all of which were capital offences—and, at the conclusion of
the trials, five men and a woman were condemned to death. Nor was there any-
thing unusual about this session, other than the detail provided in the extended
printed report of the evidence given in court and of the speeches made by Recorder
Jeffreys in sentencing the condemned.^2 An average of fifteen to twenty cases a day
was entirely typical at the Old Bailey in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, and of the trial of felonies at the county assizes in the same period.
The rapidity with which trials were conducted in this period was the result of
several features of court procedure—a consequence of a form of trial that tilted
strongly towards the side of the prosecution. This was not a matter of embar-
rassment, nor yet a matter of criticism; on the contrary, the criminal trial was re-
garded in this period, and long after, as one of the cornerstones of English
liberty. Particularly following Bushell’s case and the establishment of the legal
independence of the jury—its freedom from judicial coercion—trial by jury was
celebrated as a crucial defence against the threat of royal tyranny.^3 Few in Eng-
land would have doubted the truth of Sir Matthew Hale’s assessment that it was
‘the best Trial in the World.. .’.^4 Compared to what were thought to be the fla-
grant injustices perpetrated on the Continent, English criminal procedure was
praised for guaranteeing the right of defendants to face their accusers in a pub-
lic court, their right to bring evidence to answer the charges against them, above
260 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200 – 1800 (Chicago, 1985 ), chs 6 – 8 ; Cockburn and Green (eds.),
Twelve Good Men and True, chs 5 – 11 ; Stephan Landsman, ‘The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary
Procedure in Eighteenth Century England’, Cornell Law Review, 75 ( 1990 ), 498 – 609.
(^2) An Exact Account of the Trials of the several Persons Arraigned at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bailey for London
and Middlesex, beginning on Wednesday, Decemb. 11, 1678, and ending the 12 th of the same month( 1678 ). And see
Langbein, ‘Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers’, 274 – 5. The fact that this was Sir George Jeffreys’ first ses-
sion as recorder surely explains why the trials were reported at such unusual length and why the
recorder’s speeches to the prisoners as he sentenced them were printed verbatim. Jeffreys, the future lord
chancellor, had been elected recorder at Charles II’s urging and following the purposive promotion of
Sir William Dolben to the judiciary (G. W. Keeton, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys and the Stuart Cause( 1965 ), 122.
His task was clearly to control unrest in the City at the height of the Popish Plot. The extensive printed
account of the Old Bailey session of December 1678 , includingJeffreys’s speeches which naturally
emphasized the duty of obedience to lawful authority, were presumably part of that campaign.
(^3) Green, Verdict According to Conscience, ch. 6.
(^4) Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England, ed. by Charles M. Gray (Chicago, 1971 ), 160.