Anyone who's ever watched a crime show has inevitably come across the coroner – these are portrayed as experienced medical examiners who look after a dead body and often give a key piece of evidence that will help solve the case. But did you ever wonder where coroners even come from? You might be surprised to learn that coroners have been dealing with dead bodies since 1194. I’ll be telling you more about them today on Footnoting History.
Hi, I’m Sam and I’ll be your host today on Footnoting history and today I’ll be telling you about the medieval coroner. But before I do I’d like to remind you that all of our content is available, captioned on YouTube and that you can always visit our website www.footnotinghistory.com for more information on our work including bibliographies to get you started if you'd like to learn more about any of our topics. And now, on with the show!
Death was a profitable business for the English crown in the Middle Ages. The English crown confiscated felons’ and outlaws’ landed property for a year and a day and they got all of their chattels (that is to say their moveable property) forever. If someone died through misadventure the object or animal responsible for the death (or the deodand which literally means “given to God”) was also forfeited to the king. Which means that if a pig killed somebody that pig became the king’s property.
Weapons use in homicides (which are recorded in the English records as banes or destroyers) were also handed over to the king or to his officials. If a person of Norman descent was murdered and the murderer was not captured, the community in which the murder had taken place was liable to also pay a murdrum fine on top of everything else. But the king needed help to make sure that he got what was coming to him. And that, my friends, is where the medieval coroner comes into the picture.
The post of the coroner was created in 1194. And in most respects the coroner’s job was really fiscal and administrative. Their main responsibility was to investigate and record all sudden and unnatural deaths within their jurisdiction. That meant that if someone was killed, or died of misadventure, or committed suicide, or contracted a deadly disease, or died in prison the coroner was supposed to know about it. Coroners did other things too.
For example, they assessed the value of the property that was supposed to be turned over to the king. The coroner also could present someone non compos mentis – which meant, effectively, that they could not be held accountable for their actions due to mental incompetence. Yeah. That was a thing in the Middle Ages; you couldn’t hold somebody accountable if they weren’t responsible for their actions if they couldn’t know what they were doing.
The coroners also took the confessions of felons who intended to leave the kingdom and made arrangements for said felons to be transported to a port of their choosing. As royal officials, coroners had a relatively high status and their opinions mattered. In fact, the coroner’s word was enough to act as an indictment against presumed murderers (who would then be tried before the justices of the gaol delivery) or before the eyre courts, depending on what time period we’re looking at.
That said, the coroner never worked alone. When a body was discovered the coroner was summoned to the scene whereupon he assembled a jury composed of between 12 and 24 men from the vicinity of the crime (sometimes we see them recorded in the court rolls as “the nearest neighbors”). Unlike criminal jurors, these jurors did not pronounce any judgment. Instead they served, in effect, as witnesses reporting anything that they had seen, or heard (or suspected) about the death in question.
Often these juries would include people with medical training, who were in a better position than the coroners themselves to actually examine the body. These examinations, however, were purely superficial. While the Italians started performing autopsies in cases of suspicious death in the early 13th century, the English did not cut open corpses. It’s not entirely clear why autopsies were common in the south of Europe but almost never found in the north.
Katharine Park has suggested that it might have to do with contrasting understandings of when the body and the soul were separated. In the south of Europe, it seems that people believed that the dead person was gone and the body would feel no pain. In the north, however, there may have been a lingering belief that the soul might take some time (maybe a year or so) to fully separate from the body.
According to Park, that’s also why there are a lot more stories about revenants (which are effectively medieval zombies) in the north of Europe than in the south. But we’re not here to talk about zombies today. Maybe that’s a podcast for the future. While the coroners did not cut open any corpses, they did look into them in detail. The laws state that the body was to be viewed without cloths or coverings.
Any wounds were carefully measured – and we frequently see notations indicating both how long and how deep the injuries were. Coroners were also explicitly instructed to note any bruises and or indications of rope burn or strangulation. For drowning victims coroners were supposed to sit on the corpse’s body to determine whether or not they had actually died by drowning. (When they sat on the body, if water was expelled from the lungs, then they had probably died in the water.
But if they were murdered and then tossed into the water, there wouldn’t necessarily be any water to come out of the lungs because it wouldn’t have been breathed in.) While it might have been members of the jury who actually conducted the examinations, at the very least, coroners ensured that the details were recorded. The body, it seems, was really at the heart of the coroner’s examination.
And we know this because if it took a while to procure a coroner and if the body was buried, the corpse was supposed to be exhumed for examination by the coroner. There could, however, be other forms of evidence considered as well. Sometimes, we see notations that there were droplets of blood or that there were cart tracks and that the coroners even followed them to try to physically track down murderers. Even so, most of the time murders escaped.
And sometimes in the coroners rolls we see indications that somebody had left the area around the time of the murder and was, therefore, presumed to be guilty. You probably noticed that while we think of coroners as medical professionals, their job wasn’t actually all that connected with medicine in medieval England. Sure, they conducted medical investigations but they got help with that – and apart from one barber we don’t see any medical professionals taking on the role of coroner at all.
Coroners did not require formal training in the law either and there are only two coroners that we know of that were trained lawyers. Many coroners did, however, have some experience with the law. In fact, many of them came from families that had produced multiple coroners. Others had served in other official capacities before becoming coroners.
In effect these lesser offices might have served effectively as apprenticeships for more strenuous and more elevated positions of coroner later in their career. In both of these instances, we see some indication that certain men were driven to hold office. Coroners usually owned property in the counties where they held office. And if you think that makes a lot of sense in the context of a world in which people were deeply suspicious of outsiders, it does.
Once they were selected, coroners served for life – and that’s actually not very common for medieval officials, most of whom held their posts for only a year at a time. Although coroners might be given a stipend to allow them to hire a scrivener to help them actually maintain the records, they were not paid for the work. We must ask ourselves, then, who would have been able to do this time-consuming work of investigating death?
It had to be somebody who was wealthy, and who could afford to take substantial time away from work when they were summoned. On top of that there are social demands to consider. An effective coroner had to have a high social stature because the society in which he operated was highly status conscious. Ideally, therefore, coroners were supposed to be recruited from among the knightly class.
In fact, according to the legal literature from the turn of the 13th century, each county was supposed to have four coroners – three knights and one cleric. Presumably the cleric was mandated in order to make sure that at least one of the men was able to write. The king seems to have anticipated that the coroners would be able to swallow the costs of holding office, independently of his role.
In practice, though, only a minority of coroners were actually knights – in part because there weren’t enough knights to go around. So, in 1340 the rules were changed – thereafter the requirement was that coroners should be chosen who had enough land to allow him to “answer to all manner of People.” For the king the coroner functioned as a bridge between the central government and the local administration and could function to transmit information to the crown.
Why, if they weren’t being paid, would people want to be coroners? Some historians believe that people didn’t really want to be coroners and that those who were selected did as little work as possible. But I think the surviving rolls suggest a level of diligence.
(And here, I’ve actually linked to the Murder Maps of London, Oxford, and York where teams of historians have mapped out the cases found in the coroners’ rolls in those cities – they have also included modernized translations of the coroner’s rolls on that site so you can actually look at them and let us know what you think.) Others have assumed that coroners might have extracted bribes to compensate them for their time – but there’s not a lot of evidence to support their position.
I happen to agree with Sara Butler that officeholding in the Middle Ages offered its own rewards that were not necessarily linked to compensation. Men might have chosen to hold office because doing so enhanced their standing and influence. Or maybe they held office because they prioritized the good of their community and felt that holding office was an honorable thing to do.
I imagine that there might also have been people then, just as there are today, who simply liked being at the center of the action, in the metaphorical room where it happens – and that desire might have been enough to motivate them to hold office even if it didn’t pay anything. Of course, now I’ve wandered into the realms of speculation. We don’t know what motivated coroners. Nor do we know if they did a good job or not.
The fact of the matter is that the coroners did keep records – and when they survive they are absolutely fascinating. They’re full of detail and life (or maybe I should say of death). But not all of those deaths were violent – one of my favorite cases (which I talked about in my very first episode of Footnoting History) involved a young man named William who got wasted, climbed to the roof of a tenement and then fell to his death. There were also a lot of people who drowned.
Most coroners’ rolls don’t survive though – it seems that the main goal of these records was to make sure that the king’s courts were aware of local crimes. After that the rolls did not need to be preserved and some of them may have been regarded as the personal property of the coroners who made them which is not exactly a recipe for preservation. That said, there is some evidence that the rolls were highly valued at the time, at least until they were copied over.
One of the preserved coroners’ rolls from Norwich tells the story of two coroners who, having investigated two deaths, sat together in one of their homes to compile the notes. A gang then arrived outside of the house and demanded that they destroy their records if they did not want to be chopped into tiny pieces. The coroners refused but eventually the gang broke in and dragged one of the coroners from the premises.
They then found his roll which had been hidden under his clothes and destroyed it. This story demonstrates to me that some coroners at least took their jobs seriously and sought to protect the integrity of their work even at great personal cost. Or at least that’s what they wanted us to think. There are records of medical processionals looking at dead bodies in the context of crime investigation in continental Europe as well, but the office of coroner was unique to England.
And while the logistics of that job and what exactly it entails have changed over time, the fundamental reason for the coroner has been the same. It’s always to investigate suspicious deaths – and that is one thing that has remained consistent between the Middle Ages and today. Thank you for tuning into Footnoting History.
I hope that you enjoyed our content today and if you’d like to learn more about medieval officials reach out to our team and let me know because I’d love to tell you all about constables, and sheriffs, and even street sweepers. Until next time, remember, the best stories are always in the footnotes.