the antiquary."[1] In England, however, it was early brought into relations with the local courts of the hundred and the county, where it struck root and developed into a popular method of trial which was later to become a defence against the king's officers who had first introduced it. A bulwark of individual liberty, the jury also holds an important place in the establishment of representative government, for it was through representative juries that the voice of the countryside first asserted itself in the local courts, for the assessment of taxes as well as for the decision of cases, and it was in the negotiations of royal officers with the local juries that we can trace the beginnings of the House of Commons. It is no accident that the first employment of local juries for the assessment of military and fiscal obligations belongs to the later years of Henry II.
It may seem a far cry from the Frankish inquests of the ninth century to the juries and the representative assemblies of the twentieth, but the development is continuous, and it leads through Normandy. In this sense the English-speaking countries are all heirs of the early Normans and of the Norman kings who, all unconsciously, provided for the extension and the perpetuation of the Norman methods of trial. At such points Norman history merges in that of England, the British Empire, and the United States.
- ↑ Pollock and Maitland, i, p. 141.
