Please click here to view a provisional list of some three hundred Devon
documents given by the Oddy family to the Devon & Cornwall Record Society
for deposit within its collection.
These
papers will be available at the Devon Heritage Centre, hopefully, later this
year. The society’s council had intended
to hold event this summer to showcase the documents but the current situation
has postponed these plans. While we are
in this current crisis it is possible for DCRS members to request jpegs of
these documents and these will be sent via e-mail.
To order a jpeg please email todd@toddgray.co.uk
These
papers date from the late 1500s to the late 1700s. They originated with the business of the Devon
County courts at Rougemont Castle in Exeter and the majority are constables’
presentments providing lists of freeholders and copyholders for jury duty. The society’s president has written about
Devon juries.[i]
Dr Stephen Roberts explains that:
`In early
modern England and Wales, the assizes and quarter sessions courts managed local
government as well as the justice system. There were two kinds of juries. The
grand jury, comprising more socially elevated minor gentry and yeomanry,
considered whether a defendant had a case to answer, and also ‘presented’, or
brought to the attention of the courts, any matters that the courts might
address, ranging from moral turpitude to defective highways and drains. The
second kind of jury was the trial or petty jury, whose job was to find
defendants guilty or not guilty.
An act of 1696 sought to reform
a jury system that had long been reliant on ancient custom. Forty years
earlier, Devon assizes and quarter sessions relied on the services of handfuls
of men to serve on juries. While this ensured that the courts could guarantee
that juries could be empanelled and justice administered, the practice of using
‘professional jurors’ was plainly open to abuse and to an intolerable financial
burden on jurors compelled to abandon their normal work when trials were
extended or postponed. The 1696 act stipulated that parish constables should
bring in lists to quarter sessions, every Michaelmas, of male freeholders and
copyholders between the ages of 21 and 70. The clerk of the peace was to create
a book of all the parish returns, which would henceforth form the basis of jury
recruitment. Yorkshire, like Devon, was a huge county, and so dependent had
Yorkshire assizes become on their tiny number of jurors, it was decreed that
no-one in Yorkshire from then on was to serve on a jury more than once every
four years. No such stipulation applied to Devon, but a similar tale could have
been told here. What had been a convenient way of ensuring reliable county
government in 1649 had become corruption and unfairness by 1696.’
[i]
J. S. Cockburn & Thomas A.
Green (ed.), Twelve Good Men and True:
The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800 (Princeton, 1988), 182-213.
Dr Todd Gray
27 March 2020
