sessions and assizes in the rest of the country,^20 but the degree of repetition may
have been even higher in London than elsewhere. It is difficult to compare the
experience of jurors in the City and in the county courts because, as we will see,
London men found it acceptable to serve on both grand and trial juries, which
was not the case at the county quarter sessions, and particularly not at the
assizes. The London courts also met much more frequently than courts elsewhere
in the country. Whatever the reason, the pattern of repeated service was very
striking in the City. Between 1692 to 1699 , for example, about 600 of the 1,3 50
men who were sworn to a jury had already served on at least one occasion in that
period—which means, of course, that many more than that would be found to
have had experience if we went back to examine the juries of the decade and
more before 1692. Just within those eight years almost half the jurors had served
before, and a quarter of them three times or more.^21 A typical grand jury of sev-
enteen men would have included eight at a minimum who had served on that or
one of the trial juries at least once before; and half the trial jurors in the 1690 s
would have had previous experience, and were to that extent familiar with court
procedure, the criminal law, and the consequences of their verdicts. It seems
clear that the sheriffs’ officers had no difficulty finding men to serve in what may
have been regarded locally as rather prestigious posts.
As one would expect, given the social structure of the City, there was not as
wide a social gap among the jurors as at the county assizes, where, by the late
seventeenth century grand jurors were firmly in the gentry class, many of them
in fact magistrates, while trial jurors tended to be drawn from the distinctly
more middling ranks of farmers and craftsmen.^22 There were some broad dif-
ferences in the City, but they were not so clear or decisive as entirely to prevent
a man who sat on the grand jury at one session from taking his place on one of
the trial juries at a later time, a situation unimaginable at the county assizes by
this period.
In asking what kinds of men sat on the City juries, we can thus begin by
exam-ining the whole body together. And we can get some sense of what
kinds of men they were from the returns of the taxes collected in the 1690 s which
we have used earlier in examining the status of constables. These provide
The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century 267(^20) Cockburn and Green (eds.), Twelve Good Men and True, 88 – 94, 144–6, 164–6, 236– 7. Experienced
trial jurors were much less common in late eighteenth-century Essex and Staffordshire than in London
a hundred years earlier, but, as King and Hay show in this volume of essays, juriors with previous service
were being increasingly sworn (though by different means in each county) by the end of the century.
(Peter King, ‘ “Illiterate Plebeians, Easily Misled”: Jury Composition, Experience, and Behaviour in
Essex, 1735 – 1815 ’; and Douglas Hay, ‘The Class Composition of the Palladium of Liberty: Trial
Jurors in the Eighteenth Century’, 344‒8).
(^21) For these data, see Beattie, ‘London Juries in the 1690 s’, 236 , Table 8. 4.
(^22) King, ‘ “Illiterate Plebeians, Easily Misled”: Jury Composition, Experience, and Behaviour in
Essex, 1735 – 1815 ’; and Hay, ‘The Class Composition of the Palladium of Liberty: Trial Jurors in the
Eighteenth Century’, in Cockburn and Green (eds.), Twelve Good Men and True, 254 – 304, 305– 57.