One persistent error, universally adopted for many centuries, and even now hard to dispel, is that the Great Charter granted or guaranteed trial by jury.[231] This belief, however, which has endured so long and played so prominent a part in political theory, is now held by all competent authorities to be entirely unfounded. Not one of the three forms of a modern jury trial had taken definite shape in 1215, although the root principle from which all three subsequently grew had been in constant use since the Norman Conquest. Henry II., indeed, had done much towards developing existing tendencies in the direction of all three of its forms, namely, of the grand jury, the petty criminal jury, and the jury of civil pleas. ----- Footnote 231: The source of this error was the identification of the _judicium parium_ of chapter 39 with jury trial. This mistake is fully refuted _infra_ under that chapter. ----- Magna Carta, embodying as it does many of the innovations of Henry of Anjou, necessarily contains indications of the existence of these tendencies. Yet, as these occur incidentally in various provisions of unconnected chapters, and as they cannot readily be recognized, on account of the technical language in which they are usually couched and the apparently trivial points of legal procedure to which they relate, it seems well to preface the separate consideration of each of them under its appropriate chapter, by a short account of their mutual relations. This will conduce to a clear understanding alike of trial by jury and of the Great Charter itself. Jury trial in each of the three forms in which it is known to modern English law is able to trace an unbroken pedigree (though by three distinct lines of descent) from the same ancestor, namely, from that principle known as _recognitio_ or _inquisitio_, which was introduced into England by the Normans, and was simply the practice whereby the Crown obtained information on local affairs from the sworn testimony of local men. While thus postulating a foreign origin for this “palladium of English liberties,” we are afforded consolation by the remembrance of a fact which some modern authorities are too much inclined to neglect, namely, that the soil was prepared by Anglo-Saxon labour for its planting.[232] ----- Footnote 232: