The Post

Origin of Trials by Jury

All historians agree that St. Patrick instituted the Brehon law to abolish those laws. St. Patrick's monumental in Rome. There are many other authorities to prove that the trial by jury was known and practiced by the Pagan Irish previous to the arrival of the saint. Who, in his history of Iceland, says all disputes about land were submitted to the decision of twelve men and here is the foundation of that palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury, which was an institution among other wise laws in Ireland for centuries, and which was afterwards introduced by Alfred into the English constitution. As some persons who have been accustomed to read little else than English history, entertained the idea that Alfred invented the tribunal of trial by Jury. I would ask such to read the preface of Lolard's History of Iceland, and the able work of O Haloran, in which it has been shown that the apostle Patrick found at this examination of the Irish laws the trial of the twelve men as part of their Brehon or celestial judgments. He wisely maintained that feature in their jurisprudence, and it was found in operation by Alfred when he received his education in Ireland, where, indeed, all the Saxon princes and priests came to in those ages to be instructed in philosophy, law, literature, music and religion. No scholar or priest will venture to say that the trial by jury of twelve was known to the laws of any of the Greek islands. It cannot be found among the laws of twelve tables of Rome, nor is it in the Pandects of Justinian, a work which embodied the entire laws of the Roman Empire. No feature of trial by twelve men can be found in the institutions of the Visigoths, whose kings succeeded those of Rome in Italy, and who introduced through the south of Europe a new code of jurisprudence. Nor can it be traced in the laws of the Ostrogoths, who swarmed round the Baltic; nor least of all among the customs of the Saxons, the most ferocious and illiterate of the barbarians of Ancient Europe.