at once. Occasionally jurors still found it necessary to withdraw to discuss a ver-
dict on which they failed to agree immediately. But for the most part their rou-
tine practice on the Home Circuit, into the eighteenth century and beyond, was
to form a huddle around their foreman once a trial was concluded, to come to
an agreed verdict, and to announce it immediately.^32
It would be natural to assume that a change from private to public deliber-
ation would have had a serious effect on the quality of the juries’ work. That is
impossible to discover. It may have speeded up their decision-making to some
extent, but we are not entitled to conclude that it reduced in a substantial way
the amount of time juries had devoted to each case in private. It is true that
twelve men deliberating in public and with the eyes of the court upon them
would hardly be able to settle into a serious discussion about the evidence they
had just heard. But that may not have been very different from the practices
they had followed in the jury room with a list of eight or more cases to be decided
one after the other. Swift decisions with little discussion were typical of those pri-
vate deliberations too. The Middlesex and City juries at the well-reported De-
cember 1678 session at the Old Bailey are each said to have retired for only ‘a
short recess’ before finding verdicts on seven and six cases, respectively.^33 Rapid
judgment with apparently little discussion was typical of jury practice whether
their deliberation was held in the jury room or in court.
The fact that the juries at the Old Bailey continued to withdraw to find ver-
dicts on a list of cases long after that practice had been abandoned at the assizes
is not, then, a reflection of that court’s greater commitment to serious delibera-
tion, but more simply that the double juries at the Old Bailey had allowed the
old system to continue. So long as two separate juries—one for Middlesex cases,
the other for the City—were able to alternate in a roughly equal way, the Old
Bailey maintained that system. It was only in 1738 , when Middlesex cases had
come to outnumber City cases so seriously that the smooth alternation could
not be maintained without calling a second Middlesex jury to take a turn, that
Old Bailey juries began to deliberate in public and to announce their verdict at
the conclusion of each case.^34 It was said that the change to the form of public
discussion common in the rest of the country had been resisted in London not
out of fear that the new procedure would impair proper deliberation but, re-
vealingly, because it was thought likely to add to the time each case would take
and extend the session by several days.^35 That did not happen. The time given
272 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^32) J. S. Cockburn, ‘Twelve Silly Men? The Trial Jury at Assizes, 1560 – 1670 ’, in Cockburn and Green
(eds.), Twelve Good Men and True, 164 – 6 ; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 395 – 6.
(^33) An Exact Account of the Trials... Decemb. 1678 , pp. 25, 29.
(^34) For the changing balance between Middlesex and City cases at the Old Bailey, see Ch. 1 , Table 1. 2.
(^35) The report in the press strongly suggests that the imbalance between the Middlesex and City case-
loads was at the root of the change. The lord mayor who announced the change in court was said to have
justified it on the ground that ‘it had been thought improper for the juries to sit so long, and give their
verdicts on so many trials (which have commonly been twelve or more together) depending on the
strength of their memories or the assistance of their notes’. What he did not say was that it was the