Frankish through the intermediary of Normandy.[1] Although it has a history which can be traced for more than a thousand years, the jury does not definitely make its appearance in England until after the Norman Conquest, and the decisive steps in its further development were taken during the union of England and Normandy and probably as a result of Norman experience. It is now the general opinion of scholars that the modern jury is an outgrowth of the sworn inquests of neighbors held by command of the Norman and Angevin kings, and that the procedure in these inquests is in all essential respects the same as that employed by the Frankish rulers three centuries before. It is also generally agreed that while such inquests appear in England immediately after the Norman Conquest,—the returns of the Domesday survey are a striking example,—their employment in lawsuits remains exceptional until the time of Henry II, when they become in certain cases a matter of right and a part of the settled law of the land. What had been heretofore a special privilege of the king and of those to whom he granted it, became under Henry a right of his subjects and a part of the regular system of justice. Accomplished doubtless gradually, first for one class of cases and then for another, this extension of the king's prerogative procedure to his subjects seems to have been formulated in a definite royal act or series of acts, probably by royal ordinances or
- ↑ Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, p. 142
