Our trip to the Royal Courts of Justice

Our trip to the Royal Courts of Justice was brilliant.

From the outside, it looks like an overgrown church with arched windows and towers rising up. It is a really old building. It has lots of gigantic doorways and tiny turrets. When you stand next to it, it looks as high as the clouds.

Once inside, we had to walk through a big archway that made sure we didn’t have anything bad on us. We were then led into the main hall and then onto a court room. On the way there, it was scarily silent. We were not allowed to make any noise because we might have disturbed the courts.

When we got into the court – I thought it was going to be very different – it was very modern and full of microphones that never get turned off. We learned that the Royal Courts of Justice is a court of appeal, which means that if you don’t agree with the outcome of atrial at a lower court, you can bring a case to the Royal Courts.

The court has many hundreds of books. We learned that these books were records of trials from the past. It looked a bit like a library, but there were no aisles – the books were on shelves around the walls.

We acted out a scene from Victorian times. A boy called William accused of robbing was on trial. We each played different parts in the courtroom. Mrs Gray was an eyewitness. There were 14 jurors (but there are really only meant to be 12). I was a juror. There was also the judge, who wore a curly, grey, long wig and a black gown, the usher, the lawyers and the person who had been robbed. William claimed he had only found the things he was accused of stealing – three coats, a pair of boots and a tablecloth that has some valuable lacing on it – under a bush.

Mrs Gray (Mae) claimed, however, that William had stolen these things. William’s defence was that lots of boys looked like him and said that he had been with his brothers and sisters.

The jurors, who sat at the back, listened to all of this and decided that he was not guilty because the evidence was not strong enough against him even though he had been in prison before. He claimed that he had learned his lesson.