ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to accommodation for the assizes and quarter sessions, picking the story up in about 1860 and taking it through to 1914. It examines alterations to procedure, showing how trial by jury continued to slow down and increase in formality during this period. The chapter suggests that it was the increasing marginality of these occasions, both within the legal system and as a focus of administrative activity, which made them a suitable focus for the 'invention of tradition', a phenomenon more widely characteristic of public life in this period. It examines some examples of fully fledged 'symbolic courts'. The chapter explains a growing ambiguity at the heart of this celebration of the pageantry of the law. The trial as a spectacle was increasingly threatened by changing ideas about publicity, privacy and respectability: by 1914, some courts had begun to operate behind closed doors.
