Definition
To afforce the assise was a procedure in old English practice by which a deadlocked jury could be broken by augmenting the panel with additional jurors until twelve members could be found who unanimously agreed on a verdict. Rather than discharging a hung jury or compelling deliberation through sequestration, the court simply added new jurors to the existing panel, continuing to add members until the requisite number in agreement was reached.
The procedure operated on the premise that a verdict required twelve unanimous voices — not necessarily the same twelve who began deliberations. It was a mechanism for producing finality when the original panel could not agree, and it predates modern approaches to jury deadlock entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with medieval and early English legal procedure and will not surface in any modern statutory or case law context. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a marker of pre-modern jury practice, signaling that the surrounding source material is drawing on Bracton-era or early common law procedure rather than anything recognizable in contemporary Anglo-American trial practice.
The term is useful primarily as a reference point for understanding how the unanimity requirement in jury verdicts evolved. Modern doctrine achieves finality through mistrial and retrial when a jury cannot agree; afforcement achieved finality by changing the composition of the jury mid-process. These are fundamentally different solutions to the same problem, and conflating their logic can distort historical accounts of why jury unanimity developed as a principle.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on jury history, the development of the right to trial by jury, or early English civil and criminal procedure should flag this term as evidence of the pre-modern flexibility in jury composition — flexibility that later hardened into the fixed-panel model. Its presence in a source is a reliable indicator that the author is drawing on Bracton, Fleta, or Reeve rather than later authority.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary preserves the term with citations to three foundational sources: Bracton (fol. 185b, 292a), Fleta (lib. 4, c. 9, § 2), and Reeve's History of English Law (vol. 2, p. 267). These citations are internally consistent and point to a procedure documented in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The Black's entry is terse but accurate: the core mechanism — add jurors until twelve agree — is unambiguous.
What historical dictionaries do not address is why the practice disappeared. The transition away from afforcement tracks the broader consolidation of the jury as a fixed body of twelve, a development tied to the gradual shift from juries as witnesses to neighborhood fact to juries as impartial triers of presented evidence. Once jurors were no longer valued for personal knowledge of the parties and facts, the logic of adding new ones to break a deadlock lost its foundation. Historical sources treat the procedure descriptively without analyzing this trajectory, leaving the researcher to supply the interpretive framework.
No significant divergence exists among historical sources on the basic definition. The term is too narrow and too archaic to have generated contested meanings.
Jurisdictional Note
This procedure is exclusively a relic of early English common law and has no counterpart in any modern common law jurisdiction. It was never transplanted into American colonial or post-independence practice in any recognized form.