In spite of the vague reporting of early pleas, it is clear that the Norman kings established the jury as a regular part of the machinery of English government. In the opinion of most scholars the jury was introduced into England as a Norman institution, ultimately derived from the sworn inquests which the later Carolingian sovereigns had used for the determination of their rights. That the jury, in this sense, had been known to the early Norman dukes is possible, though it has not yet been proved. On the other hand the ‘twelve leading thegns’ of the wapentake, who swore that they would neither protect the guilty nor accuse the innocent, were members of a society which had grasped the essential principle of the jury seventy years before the Norman Conquest.