A jury was impannelled to try the question. The whole affair bears a suspicious aspect of being preconcerted to enable the accused to plead the benefit of acquittal; for no objection is taken on his part to the competency of the singular tribunal before which he is to be tried for his life; on the contrary, he highly approves of them as his judges, and in the end is pronounced not guilty. The respectable burgesses who acted as jurymen had, however, as it appears, their own grave doubts about this assumption of the highest judicial functions; and we find them in this curious little document, which we offer in full, expressing themselves with that cautious and sagacious scepticism which is as much a part of the national character as its ardour and enthusiasm. “Patrick Bryce, chancellor, and remanent persons who passed upon the said inquest, before they gave in their verdict to the said court, desired that they might be secured for the future, lest they might be quarrelled at any time hereafter for going on, and proceeding to pass on an inquest of the like nature, upon ane warning by the officer of the said University; and that in regard they declared the case to be singular, never having occurred in the age of before to their knowledge, and the rights and privileges of the University not being produced to them to clear their privilege for holding of criminal courts, and to sit and cognosce upon crimes of the like nature; whereunto it was answered by the Rector and his assessors that they opponed their being content to pass upon the said inquest _in initio_, and their making faith without contraverting their privilege; but notwithstanding thereof, for their satisfaction and _ex abundanti gratia_, they declared themselves and their successors in office enacted, bound, and obliged for their warrandice of all cost, skaith, danger, and expenses they or ane or other of them should sustain or incur through the passing upon the said inquest, or whilk could follow thereupon, through the said University their wanting of their original rights or writs for clearing to them the privilege and jurisdiction in the like cases. Whereupon the said Patrick Bryce, as Chancellor, for himself, and in name and in behalf of the haill remanent members of the said inquest, asked acts of court.”[136] Though we are not aware of any instance in Scotland where the academic tribunals have arrogated, since the Reformation, so high a power, it is not difficult to find other instances where exemption has been claimed, even at a later period, from the ordinary powers that be. Thus the _Glasgow Records_ of the year 1721 bear that—