1. ‘Michaelmas sessions of the peace at Maidstone, 28 September 1591’, from William Lambarde and Local Government: His “Ephemeris” and Twenty-Nine Charges to Juries and Commissions, ed. Conyers Read (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press for The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1962), p. 108.
2. Sir John Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially Chapter 21 (‘Here he shows how often the civil law is deficient in justice’) and Chapter 30 (‘The Prince here commends the laws of England in respect of their procedure by juries’). See also the title of a legal treatise written in the mid-sixteenth century, The Excellency and Praeheminence of the Law of England, above All other Humane Lawes in the World. Asserted In a Learned Reading upon the Statute of 35 H. 8. Cap. 6. Concerning Tryals by Iury of Twelve Men, and Tales de Circumstantibus, by Thomas Williams (printed London, 1680) (Wing no. W2772); Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) (first printed in 1583) (STC no. 22857), pp. 112–15.
3. ‘(Mis)representing Justice on the Early Modern Stage’, Studies in Philology, 109 (2012), 63–85 (p. 67). See for example Thomas Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985); J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green, eds, Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). My own focus is on the trial jury who listen to witness testimony and deliberate on the facts of the matter, skills much in use in the early modern playhouse.
4. Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion, p. 95; Paul Raffield, ‘“Terras Astraea reliquit”: Titus Andronicus and the Loss of Justice’, in Shakespeare and the Law, ed. Paul Raffield and Gary Watt (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008), pp. 203–20 (p. 215).
5. For a fuller account of the precarious place of the trial jury in late sixteenth-century England, see Derek Dunne, ‘Re-assessing Trial by Jury in Early Modern Law and Literature’, Literature Compass, 12.10 (2015), 517–26, which goes into greater depth on the issues discussed in this section.