JO HARVARD LAW REVIEW. was fully discussed by the King's Bench, and battle was adjudged to be still " the constitutional mode of trial " in this sort of case. As in an Irish case in 1815, 1 so here, to the amazement of man- kind, the defendant escaped by means of this rusty weapon. And now at last, in June, 1819, came the abolition of a long-lived relic of barbarism, which had survived in England when it had vanished everywhere else in Christendom. 2 The Grand Assize, also, that venerable original form of the jury which Henry II. established, with its cumbrous pomp of choosing for jurymen knights " girt with swords" 3 went out at the end of 1834, with the abolition of real actions. We have now traced the decay of these great mediaeval modes of trial in England. What, meantime, had been happening to the jury? That is a question to be answered hereafter. yames B. Thayer. Cambridge, May 1891. 1 Neilson, Trial by Combat, 330. 3 Stat. 59 Geo. III. c. 46, — reciting that "appeals of murder, treason, felony, and other offences, and the manner of proceeding therein, have been found to be oppres- sive; and the trial by battle in any suit is a mode of trial unfit to be used ; and it is ex- pedient that the same should be wholly abolished." The statute went on to enact that all such appeals " shall cease, determine, and become void and . . . utterly abolished, [and that] in any writ of right now depending or hereafter to be brought, the tenant shall not be received to wage battle, nor shall issue be joined or trial be had by battle in any writ of right." 8 Lord Windsor v. St. John, Dyer, 103 b.
