Sir Thomas Smith
historical figure · 2 works · 3 mentions · 7 anchored passages
Smith
in the texts
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, quoted contrasting Roman civil-law judges with English jurors.
Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, writing more than three hundred years after Magna Carta, in describing the difference between the Civil Law and the English Law, says:
“Judex is of us called Judge, but our fashion is so divers, that they which give the deadly stroke, and either condemn or acquit the man for guilty or not guilty, are not called judges, but the twelve men.
In civil causes he says:
The Genius of the Common Law
Tudor statesman and scholar cited as a witness to disorder among the northern gentry.
Thus Sir Thomas Smith tells us of ‘the insolency of the noblemen and gentlemen of the north part of England, who being far from the king and the seat of justice made almost as it were an ordinary war among themselves’;