trials for high treason, which ‘are generally managed for the Crown with greater
Skill and Zeal than ordinary Prosecutions’, and trials for felony, including all the
offences against property, in which it could still be assumed in 1721 that the pros-
ecution would not be organized and presented by lawyers. It remained the dom-
inant view that since trials for felonies were essentially confrontations between
victims and the accused, prisoners were at no disadvantage in speaking for
themselves. As Hawkins said, it required ‘no manner of Skill to make a plain and
honest Defence’. If the jurors could watch the accused respond to the evidence
as he heard it for the first time and hear his defence as it naturally occurred to
him, he argued, the truth of his innocence or guilt would be apparent.^13 That
view of the trial was almost certainly widely shared when Hawkins wrote his
treatise in the second decade of the eighteenth century, though there would
arise soon thereafter good reason to doubt the continuing fairness of trial
procedure in all cases, and some major alterations as a consequence.
Jurors and jury practice
The two criminal courts in the City—the sessions of the peace held in the Guild-
hall and the gaol delivery at the Old Bailey—each required two juries, as at the
quarter sessions and assizes in the rest of the country: a grand jury to decide
whether the evidence presented against each of the accused justified their being
sent to trial; and a petty or trial jury that would decide their guilt or innocence.
The system by which these jurors were assembled was well established in the
late seventeenth century. On the first day of the sessions eight times a year a
panel of fifty jurors was summoned to the sessions of the peace in the Guildhall,
from which a grand jury was chosen and began its work. A trial jury for the ses-
sions of the peace was also chosen from the same panel and the lord mayor,
recorder, and the other City magistrates in attendance began the trial of of-
fenders charged with misdemeanours. After two days the City officials invari-
ably moved on to the Old Bailey for the opening of the gaol delivery session and
the trial of the accused felons from Middlesex as well as the City. The City ses-
sions of the peace were adjourned for the duration of the gaol delivery at the
Old Bailey. The grand jury that had begun at the Guildhall also moved the few
hundred yards to the Old Bailey and continued its work there, examining now
the bills of indictment drawn up against the City prisoners being held in New-
gate.^14 The Guildhall trial jury did not move to the Old Bailey, however. A new
264 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^13) Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown, ii. 400 – 2.
(^14) The account of the gaol delivery session at the Old Bailey December 1678 (An Exact Account of the
Trials.. .) reported that on the first morning, after six London prisoners and ten Middlesex prisoners had
been arraigned, ‘the Grand Jury for London coming in to bring in their bills, were sworn anew, to en-
quire upon the New Commissions.. .’ (p. 5 ). They were sworn again, but not charged, that is addressed
by one of the judges on the tasks they were to perform and the law they were to enforce. Grand juries
were invariably charged at both quarter sessions and assizes, and dozens of such charges were subse-
quently printed. For a list, see J. N. Adams and G. Averley (comps.), A Bibliography of Eighteenth-Century