Managers persons abundantly practised in the law, as used in the
inferior jurisdictions, who could easily have followed the precedents of
indictments, if they had not purposely, and for the best reasons,
avoided such precedents.

A great writer on the criminal law, Justice Foster, in one of his
Discourses,[15] fully recognizes those principles for which your
Managers have contended, and which have to this time been uniformly
observed in Parliament. In a very elaborate reasoning on the case of a
trial in Parliament, (the trial of those who had murdered Edward II.,)
he observes thus:--"It is _well known_, that, in _Parliamentary_
proceedings of this kind, _it is, and ever was_, sufficient that matters
appear with proper light and certainty to _a common understanding_,
without that minute exactness which is required in criminal proceedings
in Westminster Hall. In these cases the rule has always been, _Loquendum
ut vulgus_." And in a note he says,--"In the proceeding against
Mortimer, in this Parliament, _so little regard was had to the forms
used in legal proceedings_, that he who had been frequently summoned to
Parliament as a baron, and had lately been created Earl of March, is
styled through the whole record merely Roger de Mortimer."

The departure from the common forms in the first case alluded to by
Foster (viz., the trial of Berkeley, Maltravers, &c., for treason, in
the murder of Edward II.[16]) might be more plausibly attacked, because
they were tried, though in Parliament, by a jury of freeholders: which
circumstance might have given occasion to justify a nearer approach to
the forms of indictments below. But no such forms were observed, nor in
the opinion of this able judge ought they to have been observed.