Conclusion

Summary

The book’s conclusion opens with Thomas Smith’s late sixteenth-century description of a judge’s instruction to the jury and returns to the question of how jurors’ roles were understood at the time that England abandoned trial by ordeal in favor of jury trial for felonies. It returns to the questions that opened the book, including how one might explain the high felony acquittal rate and how central the issue of mind was to the determination of guilt and innocence in medieval English felony cases. Looking ahead to later treatise literature, the conclusion then considers how later treatise writers, namely Coke, Hale, and Blackstone, would describe mens rea in subsequent centuries as the common law of felony came to be articulated in writing. Returning to questions of methodology, the conclusion emphasizes again the intertwining of the legal and the literary in medieval English culture, focusing on a sermon that employed a defendant choosing a defense strategy as a metaphor for the importance of confession and contrition. The book concludes with a restatement of its core claim: that issues of mind pervaded medieval English jurors’ understandings of the nature of guilt and innocence.