From Alfred to Iolanthe: the Myth and Importance of Trial by Jury

‘The Law is the true embodiment

Of everything that’s excellent.

It has no kind of fault or flaw,

And I, my Lords, embody the Law.’

So sings the Lord Chancellor following his entry on stage in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. The current Lord Chancellor, David Lammy MP, certainly seems to consider his judgement faultless and flawless. Despite opposition in Parliament and protest from more than 3,200 members of the legal profession – including 300 senior barristers and 22 retired judges – Lammy is pushing through plans to remove the right of trial by jury for cases where the punishment is less than three years.

Opponents to the proposals, both in and outside of Parliament, have argued it is one of the most dangerous threats to English liberty in over 800 years. Such emphasis on the importance of jury trails is by no means new. The Victorians took immense pride in what they regarded as the uniquely English institution of trial by jury: a system in which justice was determined by a panel of free-born Britons, drawn from the body of the nation itself. Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham encapsulated this ideal when he declared that the purpose of the English constitution was to secure the presence of ‘twelve good men into a [jury] box’. From all elements of Victorian society there was a deeply rooted belief that jury trial had long served as a cornerstone of English liberty, safeguarding both justice and civil rights. It was not merely a legal mechanism, but a symbol of participatory justice.

This belief was further strengthened by the widespread conviction that trial by jury was an ancient inheritance from the Anglo-Saxon past. For a society steeped in patriotic reverence for that period (and for figures such as Alfred the Great in particular) the jury system appeared to offer proof of an unbroken constitutional tradition. Stretching back to a supposedly freer and more egalitarian age, the jury stood not only as a legal safeguard, but as a living embodiment of national identity itself.

Such historical claims, however, were less about accuracy than about reassurance. The Victorian fascination with the Anglo-Saxons emerged in response to the profound disruptions of the 19^th Century: industrialisation, social upheaval, and political reform all contributed to a sense of instability. In turn, this fostered a nostalgic longing for an imagined past of order, simplicity, and moral clarity. The medieval –

and especially the Anglo-Saxon – world was recast as a stable, almost pastoral counterpoint to modern complexity. This impulse could be seen across Victorian culture, from the revival of Gothic architecture to the ritualism of the Oxford Movement, both of which sought to reconnect society with a perceived lost inheritance of faith, tradition, and heritage.

Within this framework, Alfred the Great was elevated into a near-mythic figure: a wise and just ruler who embodied the virtues the Victorians wished to claim as their own. Charles Dickens, in his Child’s History of England (1852), praised Alfred as a lawgiver who ensured his people might ‘live more happily and freely’, presenting him as the originator of distinctly English ideals of justice and governance. Alfred thus became not simply a historical king, but a symbolic guarantor of national virtue – a figure through whom contemporary institutions, including the jury, could be traced back to a venerable and heroic origin.

This romanticisation was reinforced by the broader ideology of Anglo-Saxonism and the so-called ‘Norman Yoke’. According to this view, the Norman conquest had interrupted an earlier tradition of English liberty, imposing feudal oppression on a previously free Saxon society. By the 19^th Century, reformers and radicals invoked this theory to argue that modern political change was not innovation, but restoration: a reclaiming of ancient rights. The jury system assumed even greater ideological weight, standing as evidence of a long-standing English commitment to collective justice and resistance to arbitrary authority.

Yet the historical reality was far more complex. Trial by jury, as it developed into its recognisable modern form, was not an Anglo-Saxon creation but emerged much later – with significant Norman influence. Early references, such as those cited by Sir Henry Spelman in his Life of Alfred the Great, rested on misinterpretations of sources. Despite its shaky historical foundations, this myth performed an important cultural function. By projecting the jury system into a distant and heroic past, Victorians legitimised it as an essential and time-honoured safeguard of liberty. It became not simply a procedural feature of the legal system, but a constitutional inheritance – one that connected the present to an imagined lineage of fairness, participation, and restraint on power.

At the same time, Victorian observers were not entirely blind to the system’s flaws. In practice, jury trials were often hurried and uncomfortable affairs. Felony cases could be concluded in under half an hour, with jurors expected to deliberate quickly under physical strain: denied food, warmth, or comfort until a unanimous verdict was reached. Payment was minimal, and courtroom conditions were frequently poor. It seems little has changed. Such realities stood in stark contrast to the elevated rhetoric surrounding the institution.

Contemporary literature and satire exposed these contradictions. Charles Dickens, in The Pickwick Papers, wryly observed that ‘a good, contented, well-breakfasted juryman, is a capital thing to get hold of’, noting the susceptibility of jurors to hunger and mood. Similarly, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury highlights the performative and emotional dimensions of the courtroom, depicting a jury swayed less by evidence than by theatricality and sentiment. These portrayals reveal an underlying tension: while the jury was celebrated as a guarantor of impartial justice, it could in practice be influenced by bias, spectacle, and circumstance.

It is precisely this tension – between myth and mechanism – that underscores the enduring importance of trial by jury. Even in the Victorian period, when its shortcomings were well understood, the institution was fiercely defended because of what it represented: the involvement of ordinary citizens in the administration of justice, and a check against the concentration of legal authority in the hands of the state. The jury’s symbolic power lay not in its perfection, but in its role as a barrier between the individual and state power.

Against this historical backdrop, contemporary proposals to curtail jury trials risk discarding not merely a procedural convenience, but a deeply embedded constitutional principle. The Victorian reverence for jury trial, however mythologised, reflected a profound recognition that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done by the people themselves. To remove that safeguard, even in less serious cases, is to erode a tradition long regarded as central to the protection of liberty.

The Victorian defence of the jury system remains instructive. However flawed its operation, and however embellished its origins, the principle it embodies: that ordinary citizens should stand in judgment, rather than the state alone, continues to serve as a vital counterweight within the legal system. To abandon it lightly would be to overlook both its historical significance and its enduring constitutional value.