_Question of their right to return a general verdict._--The precedents, however, which these judges endeavoured to establish, were repelled in a more decisive manner than by a resolution of the House of Commons. For in two cases, where the fines thus imposed upon jurors had been estreated into the exchequer, Hale, then chief baron, with the advice of most of the judges of England, as he informs us, stayed process; and in a subsequent case it was resolved by all the judges, except one, that it was against law to fine a jury for giving a verdict contrary to the court's direction. Yet notwithstanding this very recent determination, the recorder of London, in 1670, upon the acquittal of the quakers, Penn and Mead, on an indictment for an unlawful assembly, imposed a fine of forty marks on each of the jury.[15] Bushell, one of their number, being committed for non-payment of this fine, sued his writ of habeas corpus from the court of common pleas; and on the return made that he had been committed for finding a verdict against full and manifest evidence, and against the direction of the court, Chief Justice Vaughan held the ground to be insufficient, and discharged the party. In his reported judgment on this occasion, he maintains the practice of fining jurors, merely on this account, to be comparatively recent, and clearly against law.[16] No later instance of it is recorded; and perhaps it can only be ascribed to the violence that still prevailed in the House of Commons against nonconformists, that the recorder escaped its animadversion.