impaneling juries. Prior to the Act, the main means of ensuring impartiality was by allowing legal challenges to the sheriff's choices. The new provisions did not specifically aim at establishing impartiality but had the effect of reinforcing the authority of the jury by guaranteeing impartiality at the point of selection. 19th-century England In 1825, the rules concerning juror selection were consolidated. Property qualifications and various other rules were standardised, although an exemption was left open for towns which "possessed" their own courts. This reflected a more general understanding that local officials retained a large amount of discretion regarding which people they actually summoned. In the late eighteenth century, King has found evidence of butchers being excluded from service in Essex; while Crosby has found evidence of "peripatetic ice cream vendors" not being summoned in the summer time as late as 1923. 20th-century England After 1919, women were no longer excluded from jury service by virtue of their sex, although they still had to satisfy the ordinary property qualifications. The exemption which had been created by the 1825 Act for towns which "possessed" their own courts meant ten towns were free to ignore the property qualifications. This amplified in these towns the general understanding that local officials had a free hand in summoning freely from among those people who were qualified to be jurors. In 1920, three of these ten towns – Leicester, Lincoln, and Nottingham – consistently empanelled assize juries of six men and six women; while at the Bristol, Exeter, and Norwich assizes no women were empanelled at all. This quickly led to a tightening up of the rules, and an abolition of these ten towns' discretion. After 1922, trial juries throughout England had to satisfy the same qualifications; although it was not until the 1980s that a centralised system was designed for selecting jurors from among the people who were qualified to serve. This meant there was still a great amount of discretion in the hands of local officials. Trial jury size The size of the jury is to provide a "cross-section" of the public. In Williams v. Florida, , the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Florida state jury of six was sufficient, that "the 12-man panel is not a necessary ingredient of "trial by jury," and that respondent's refusal to impanel more than the six members provided for by Florida law "did not