Of the many judicial reforms of Henry’s reign none is more significant than the measures which he took for extending the use of the jury as a method of trial in the royal courts, and none illustrates better the relation of Norman to English institutions. Characteristic as the jury is in the history of English government and of English law, as at once the palladium of personal liberty and the basis of representative institutions in Parliament, it is a striking fact that originally it was “not popular but royal,” not English but Norman, or rather Frankish through the intermediary of Normandy.[38] Although it has a history which can be traced for more than a thousand years, the jury does not definitely make its appearance in England until after the Norman Conquest, and the decisive steps in its further development were taken during the union of England and Normandy and probably as a result of Norman experience. It is now the general opinion of scholars that the modern jury is an outgrowth of the sworn inquests of neighbors held by command of the Norman and Angevin kings, and that the procedure in these inquests is in all essential respects the same as that employed by the Frankish rulers three centuries before. It is also generally agreed that while such inquests appear in England immediately after the Norman Conquest,--the returns of the Domesday survey are a striking example,--their employment in lawsuits remains exceptional until the time of Henry II, when they become in certain cases a matter of right and a part of the settled law of the land. What had been heretofore a special privilege of the king and of those to whom he granted it, became under Henry a right of his subjects and a part of the regular system of justice. Accomplished doubtless gradually, first for one class of cases and then for another, this extension of the king’s prerogative procedure to his subjects seems to have been formulated in a definite royal act or series of acts, probably by royal ordinances or assizes, whence the procedure is often called the assize. In England the earliest of these assizes known to us appears in 1164 in the Constitutions of Clarendon, followed shortly by applications of this mode of trial to other kinds of cases. In Normandy repeated references to similar assizes occur some years earlier, between 1156 and 1159, so that as far as present evidence goes, the priority of Normandy in this respect is clear. Moreover, Normandy offers two pieces of evidence that are still earlier. In the oldest cartulary of Bayeux cathedral, called the _Black Book_ and still preserved high up in one of its ancient towers, are two writs of the duke ordering his justices to have determined by sworn inquest, in accordance with the duke’s assize, the facts in dispute between the bishop of Bayeux and certain of his tenants. The ducal initial was left blank when these writs were copied into the cartulary, in order that it might later be