Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- 1 Jury: this palladium of our liberties, sacred and inviolate
- 2 Delivering the truth not the same as judging
- 3 Guilt and innocence a matter of conscience
- 4 ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to Henry II's revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty
- 5 Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of the wapentake?
- 6 Why promulgated at Wantage?
- 7 The twelve of the wapentake probably an institution for the Danelaw only
- 8 Conclusion
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
4 - ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to Henry II's revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty
from PART II - ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- 1 Jury: this palladium of our liberties, sacred and inviolate
- 2 Delivering the truth not the same as judging
- 3 Guilt and innocence a matter of conscience
- 4 ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ (1688), its debt to Henry II's revival of ancient institutions fostering liberty
- 5 Trial by jury not a Proto-Germanic nor perhaps an Anglo-Saxon institution; but what of the twelve leading thegns of the wapentake?
- 6 Why promulgated at Wantage?
- 7 The twelve of the wapentake probably an institution for the Danelaw only
- 8 Conclusion
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
Shortly before the events of 1848, Josef Ignaz Gundermann published a treatise on the origin of the jury in England. He outlines a more single-stranded development than Köstlin's ‘Combinationstheorie’, a development that breaks at the Norman Conquest, unlike the gradual emergence from the oath-helpers of Germanic antiquity to the jurors of the age of Henry II to modern times described by G.L. von Maurer. Nevertheless, like Köstlin and Maurer, Gundermann looks to developments in the laws of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England as relevant to the legal situation of modern Germany, and, in a spirit of Germanic nationalist superiority, involves the French Revolution, in a vague phrase. More clearly he involves the steady English striving to advance civil liberty culminating in what Dickens called ‘England's great and glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Gundermann says:
There are questions which at some time must occupy every citizen as he educates himself and every German man. The one that forms our subject is of that kind.
It is not our concern here to understand some foreign and uninteresting legal institution, but to understand by that means the constitution of a country that alone among the Germanic countries has manifested a steady national development …, and that has overcome feudalism without overthrowing it, whose Revolution was an act very different, especially in respect of its legal system, from the French Revolution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 132 - 135Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000