April 6, 2024 • 11 mins
(Host: Samantha)
If you've watched any significant number of crime dramas you've almost certainly come across a coroner who was probably presented as an experienced medical examiner who, if the hero is lucky, has unearthed a key piece of evidence to solve the case. But did you know that coroners have been investigating death since the end of the twelfth century? Learn more right now on Footnoting History.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Anyone who's ever watched a crime show has inevitablycome across the coroner – these are portrayed
as experienced medical examiners who lookafter a dead body and often give a key piece
of evidence that will help solve the case.
But did you ever wonder where coroners evencome from?
You might be surprised to learn that coronershave been dealing with dead bodies since 1194.
I’ll be telling you more about them todayon Footnoting History.
(00:24):
Hi, I’m Sam and I’ll be your host todayon Footnoting history and today I’ll be
telling you about the medieval coroner.
But before I do I’d like to remind you thatall of our content is available, captioned
on YouTube and that you can always visit ourwebsite www.footnotinghistory.com for more
information on our work including bibliographies toget you started if you'd like to learn more
(00:45):
about any of our topics.
And now, on with the show!
Death was a profitable business for the Englishcrown in the Middle Ages.
The English crown confiscated felons’ andoutlaws’ landed property for a year and
a day and they got all of their chattels (thatis to say their moveable property) forever.
If someone died through misadventure the objector animal responsible for the death (or the
(01:06):
deodand which literally means “given toGod”) was also forfeited to the king.
Which means that if a pig killed somebodythat pig became the king’s property.
Weapons use in homicides (which are recordedin the English records as banes or
destroyers) were also handed over tothe king or to his officials.
If a person of Norman descent was murderedand the murderer was not captured, the community
(01:29):
in which the murder had taken place wasliable to also pay a murdrum fine
on top of everything else.
But the king needed help to make sure thathe got what was coming to him.
And that, my friends, is where the medievalcoroner comes into the picture.
The post of the coroner was created in 1194.
And in most respects the coroner’s job wasreally fiscal and administrative.
(01:51):
Their main responsibility was to investigateand record all sudden and unnatural deaths
within their jurisdiction.
That meant that if someone was killed, ordied of misadventure, or committed suicide,
or contracted a deadly disease, or died inprison the coroner was supposed to know about
it.
Coroners did other things too.
For example, they assessed the value of theproperty that was supposed to be turned over
(02:11):
to the king.
The coroner also could present someone noncompos mentis – which meant, effectively,
that they could not be held accountable fortheir actions due to mental incompetence.
Yeah.
That was a thing in the Middle Ages; you couldn’thold somebody accountable if they weren’t
responsible for their actions if they couldn’tknow what they were doing.
The coroners also took the confessions offelons who intended to leave the kingdom and
(02:33):
made arrangements for said felons to be transportedto a port of their choosing.
As royal officials, coroners had a relativelyhigh status and their opinions mattered.
In fact, the coroner’s word was enough toact as an indictment against presumed murderers
(who would then be tried before the justicesof the gaol delivery) or before the eyre courts,
depending on what time period we’re lookingat.
That said, the coroner never worked alone.
(02:54):
When a body was discovered the coroner wassummoned to the scene whereupon he assembled
a jury composed of between 12 and 24 men fromthe vicinity of the crime (sometimes we see
them recorded in the court rolls as “thenearest neighbors”).
Unlike criminal jurors, these jurors did notpronounce any judgment.
Instead they served, in effect, as witnessesreporting anything that they had seen, or
(03:15):
heard (or suspected) about the death in question.
Often these juries would include people withmedical training, who were in a better position
than the coroners themselves to actually examinethe body.
These examinations, however, were purely superficial.
While the Italians started performing autopsiesin cases of suspicious death in the early
13th century, the English did not cut opencorpses.
(03:36):
It’s not entirely clear why autopsies werecommon in the south of Europe but almost never
found in the north.
Katharine Park has suggested that it mighthave to do with contrasting understandings
of when the body and the soul were separated.
In the south of Europe, it seems that peoplebelieved that the dead person was gone and
the body would feel no pain.
In the north, however, there may have beena lingering belief that the soul might take
(03:59):
some time (maybe a year or so) to fully separatefrom the body.
According to Park, that’s also why thereare a lot more stories about revenants (which
are effectively medieval zombies) in the northof Europe than in the south.
But we’re not here to talk about zombiestoday.
Maybe that’s a podcast for the future.
While the coroners did not cut open any corpses,they did look into them in detail.
(04:20):
The laws state that the body was to be viewedwithout cloths or coverings.
Any wounds were carefully measured – andwe frequently see notations indicating both
how long and how deep the injuries were.
Coroners were also explicitly instructed tonote any bruises and or indications of rope
burn or strangulation.
For drowning victims coroners were supposedto sit on the corpse’s body to determine
(04:42):
whether or not they had actually died by drowning.
(When they sat on the body, if water was expelledfrom the lungs, then they had probably died
in the water.
But if they were murdered and then tossedinto the water, there wouldn’t necessarily
be any water to come out of the lungs becauseit wouldn’t have been breathed in.)
While it might have been members of the jurywho actually conducted the examinations, at
(05:03):
the very least, coroners ensured that thedetails were recorded.
The body, it seems, was really at the heartof the coroner’s examination.
And we know this because if it took a whileto procure a coroner and if the body was buried,
the corpse was supposed to be exhumed forexamination by the coroner.
There could, however, be other forms of evidenceconsidered as well.
Sometimes, we see notations that there weredroplets of blood or that there were cart
(05:25):
tracks and that the coroners even followedthem to try to physically track down murderers.
Even so, most of the time murders escaped.
And sometimes in the coroners rolls we seeindications 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 ofcoroners as medical professionals, their job
wasn’t actually all that connected withmedicine in medieval England.
(05:48):
Sure, they conducted medical investigationsbut they got help with that – and apart
from one barber we don’t see any medicalprofessionals taking on the role of coroner
at all.
Coroners did not require formal training inthe law either and there are only two coroners
that we know of that were trained lawyers.
Many coroners did, however, have some experiencewith the law.
(06:09):
In fact, many of them came from families thathad produced multiple coroners.
Others had served in other official capacitiesbefore becoming coroners.
In effect these lesser offices might haveserved effectively as apprenticeships for
more strenuous and more elevated positions of coronerlater in their career.
In both of these instances, we see some indicationthat certain men were driven to hold office.
(06:31):
Coroners usually owned property in the countieswhere they held office.
And if you think that makes a lot of sensein the context of a world in which people
were deeply suspicious of outsiders, it does.
Once they were selected, coroners served forlife – and that’s actually not very common
for medieval officials, most of whom heldtheir posts for only a year at a time.
Although coroners might be given a stipendto allow them to hire a scrivener to help
(06:54):
them actually maintain the records, they werenot paid for the work.
We must ask ourselves, then, who would havebeen able to do this time-consuming work of
investigating death?
It had to be somebody who was wealthy, andwho could afford to take substantial time
away from work when they were summoned.
On top of that there are social demands toconsider.
An effective coroner had to have a high socialstature because the society in which he operated
(07:16):
was highly status conscious.
Ideally, therefore, coroners were supposedto be recruited from among the knightly class.
In fact, according to the legal literaturefrom the turn of the 13th century, each county
was supposed to have four coroners – threeknights and one cleric.
Presumably the cleric was mandated in orderto make sure that at least one of the men
was able to write.
The king seems to have anticipated that thecoroners would be able to swallow the costs
(07:39):
of holding office, independently of his role.
In practice, though, only a minority of coronerswere actually knights – in part because
there weren’t enough knights to go around.
So, in 1340 the rules were changed – thereafterthe 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 bridgebetween the central government and the local
(08:03):
administration and could function to transmitinformation to the crown.
Why, if they weren’t being paid, would peoplewant to be coroners?
Some historians believe that people didn’treally want to be coroners and that those
who were selected did as little work as possible.
But I think the surviving rolls suggest alevel of diligence.
(And here, I’ve actually linked to the MurderMaps of London, Oxford, and York where teams
(08:26):
of historians have mapped out the cases foundin the coroners’ rolls in those cities – they
have also included modernized translationsof the coroner’s rolls on that site so you
can actually look at them and let us knowwhat you think.)
Others have assumed that coroners might haveextracted bribes to compensate them for their
time – but there’s not a lot of evidenceto support their position.
I happen to agree with Sara Butler that officeholdingin the Middle Ages offered its own rewards
(08:51):
that were not necessarily linked to compensation.
Men might have chosen to hold office becausedoing so enhanced their standing and influence.
Or maybe they held office because they prioritizedthe good of their community and felt that
holding office was an honorable thing to do.
I imagine that there might also have beenpeople then, just as there are today, who
simply liked being at the center of the action, in the metaphorical room where it happens – and
(09:13):
that desire might have been enough to motivatethem to hold office even if it didn’t pay
anything.
Of course, now I’ve wandered into the realmsof 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 coronersdid keep records – and when they survive
they are absolutely fascinating.
They’re full of detail and life (or maybeI should say of death).
(09:36):
But not all of those deaths were violent – oneof 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 tenementand 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 courtswere aware of local crimes.
(09:58):
After that the rolls did not need to be preservedand some of them may have been regarded as
the personal property of the coroners whomade them which is not exactly a recipe for
preservation.
That said, there is some evidence that therolls were highly valued at the time, at least
until they were copied over.
One of the preserved coroners’ rolls fromNorwich tells the story of two coroners who,
having investigated two deaths, sat togetherin one of their homes to compile the notes.
(10:22):
A gang then arrived outside of the house anddemanded that they destroy their records if
they did not want to be chopped into tinypieces.
The coroners refused but eventually the gangbroke in and dragged one of the coroners from
the premises.
They then found his roll which had been hiddenunder his clothes and destroyed it.
This story demonstrates to me that some coronersat least took their jobs seriously and sought
(10:43):
to protect the integrity of their work evenat great personal cost.
Or at least that’s what they wanted us tothink.
There are records of medical processionalslooking 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 whatexactly it entails have changed over time,
(11:04):
the fundamental reason for the coroner hasbeen 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 todayand if you’d like to learn more about medieval
officials reach out to our team and let meknow because I’d love to tell you all about
(11:26):
constables, and sheriffs, and even streetsweepers.
Until next time, remember, the best storiesare always in the footnotes.
Anyone who's ever watched a crime show has inevitablycome across the coroner – these are portrayed
as experienced medical examiners who lookafter a dead body and often give a key piece
of evidence that will help solve the case.
But did you ever wonder where coroners evencome from?
You might be surprised to learn that coronershave been dealing with dead bodies since 1194.
I’ll be telling you more about them todayon Footnoting History.
(00:24):
Hi, I’m Sam and I’ll be your host todayon Footnoting history and today I’ll be
telling you about the medieval coroner.
But before I do I’d like to remind you thatall of our content is available, captioned
on YouTube and that you can always visit ourwebsite www.footnotinghistory.com for more
information on our work including bibliographies toget you started if you'd like to learn more
(00:45):
about any of our topics.
And now, on with the show!
Death was a profitable business for the Englishcrown in the Middle Ages.
The English crown confiscated felons’ andoutlaws’ landed property for a year and
a day and they got all of their chattels (thatis to say their moveable property) forever.
If someone died through misadventure the objector animal responsible for the death (or the
(01:06):
deodand which literally means “given toGod”) was also forfeited to the king.
Which means that if a pig killed somebodythat pig became the king’s property.
Weapons use in homicides (which are recordedin the English records as banes or
destroyers) were also handed over tothe king or to his officials.
If a person of Norman descent was murderedand the murderer was not captured, the community
(01:29):
in which the murder had taken place wasliable to also pay a murdrum fine
on top of everything else.
But the king needed help to make sure thathe got what was coming to him.
And that, my friends, is where the medievalcoroner comes into the picture.
The post of the coroner was created in 1194.
And in most respects the coroner’s job wasreally fiscal and administrative.
(01:51):
Their main responsibility was to investigateand record all sudden and unnatural deaths
within their jurisdiction.
That meant that if someone was killed, ordied of misadventure, or committed suicide,
or contracted a deadly disease, or died inprison the coroner was supposed to know about
it.
Coroners did other things too.
For example, they assessed the value of theproperty that was supposed to be turned over
(02:11):
to the king.
The coroner also could present someone noncompos mentis – which meant, effectively,
that they could not be held accountable fortheir actions due to mental incompetence.
Yeah.
That was a thing in the Middle Ages; you couldn’thold somebody accountable if they weren’t
responsible for their actions if they couldn’tknow what they were doing.
The coroners also took the confessions offelons who intended to leave the kingdom and
(02:33):
made arrangements for said felons to be transportedto a port of their choosing.
As royal officials, coroners had a relativelyhigh status and their opinions mattered.
In fact, the coroner’s word was enough toact as an indictment against presumed murderers
(who would then be tried before the justicesof the gaol delivery) or before the eyre courts,
depending on what time period we’re lookingat.
That said, the coroner never worked alone.
(02:54):
When a body was discovered the coroner wassummoned to the scene whereupon he assembled
a jury composed of between 12 and 24 men fromthe vicinity of the crime (sometimes we see
them recorded in the court rolls as “thenearest neighbors”).
Unlike criminal jurors, these jurors did notpronounce any judgment.
Instead they served, in effect, as witnessesreporting anything that they had seen, or
(03:15):
heard (or suspected) about the death in question.
Often these juries would include people withmedical training, who were in a better position
than the coroners themselves to actually examinethe body.
These examinations, however, were purely superficial.
While the Italians started performing autopsiesin cases of suspicious death in the early
13th century, the English did not cut opencorpses.
(03:36):
It’s not entirely clear why autopsies werecommon in the south of Europe but almost never
found in the north.
Katharine Park has suggested that it mighthave to do with contrasting understandings
of when the body and the soul were separated.
In the south of Europe, it seems that peoplebelieved that the dead person was gone and
the body would feel no pain.
In the north, however, there may have beena lingering belief that the soul might take
(03:59):
some time (maybe a year or so) to fully separatefrom the body.
According to Park, that’s also why thereare a lot more stories about revenants (which
are effectively medieval zombies) in the northof Europe than in the south.
But we’re not here to talk about zombiestoday.
Maybe that’s a podcast for the future.
While the coroners did not cut open any corpses,they did look into them in detail.
(04:20):
The laws state that the body was to be viewedwithout cloths or coverings.
Any wounds were carefully measured – andwe frequently see notations indicating both
how long and how deep the injuries were.
Coroners were also explicitly instructed tonote any bruises and or indications of rope
burn or strangulation.
For drowning victims coroners were supposedto sit on the corpse’s body to determine
(04:42):
whether or not they had actually died by drowning.
(When they sat on the body, if water was expelledfrom the lungs, then they had probably died
in the water.
But if they were murdered and then tossedinto the water, there wouldn’t necessarily
be any water to come out of the lungs becauseit wouldn’t have been breathed in.)
While it might have been members of the jurywho actually conducted the examinations, at
(05:03):
the very least, coroners ensured that thedetails were recorded.
The body, it seems, was really at the heartof the coroner’s examination.
And we know this because if it took a whileto procure a coroner and if the body was buried,
the corpse was supposed to be exhumed forexamination by the coroner.
There could, however, be other forms of evidenceconsidered as well.
Sometimes, we see notations that there weredroplets of blood or that there were cart
(05:25):
tracks and that the coroners even followedthem to try to physically track down murderers.
Even so, most of the time murders escaped.
And sometimes in the coroners rolls we seeindications 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 ofcoroners as medical professionals, their job
wasn’t actually all that connected withmedicine in medieval England.
(05:48):
Sure, they conducted medical investigationsbut they got help with that – and apart
from one barber we don’t see any medicalprofessionals taking on the role of coroner
at all.
Coroners did not require formal training inthe law either and there are only two coroners
that we know of that were trained lawyers.
Many coroners did, however, have some experiencewith the law.
(06:09):
In fact, many of them came from families thathad produced multiple coroners.
Others had served in other official capacitiesbefore becoming coroners.
In effect these lesser offices might haveserved effectively as apprenticeships for
more strenuous and more elevated positions of coronerlater in their career.
In both of these instances, we see some indicationthat certain men were driven to hold office.
(06:31):
Coroners usually owned property in the countieswhere they held office.
And if you think that makes a lot of sensein the context of a world in which people
were deeply suspicious of outsiders, it does.
Once they were selected, coroners served forlife – and that’s actually not very common
for medieval officials, most of whom heldtheir posts for only a year at a time.
Although coroners might be given a stipendto allow them to hire a scrivener to help
(06:54):
them actually maintain the records, they werenot paid for the work.
We must ask ourselves, then, who would havebeen able to do this time-consuming work of
investigating death?
It had to be somebody who was wealthy, andwho could afford to take substantial time
away from work when they were summoned.
On top of that there are social demands toconsider.
An effective coroner had to have a high socialstature because the society in which he operated
(07:16):
was highly status conscious.
Ideally, therefore, coroners were supposedto be recruited from among the knightly class.
In fact, according to the legal literaturefrom the turn of the 13th century, each county
was supposed to have four coroners – threeknights and one cleric.
Presumably the cleric was mandated in orderto make sure that at least one of the men
was able to write.
The king seems to have anticipated that thecoroners would be able to swallow the costs
(07:39):
of holding office, independently of his role.
In practice, though, only a minority of coronerswere actually knights – in part because
there weren’t enough knights to go around.
So, in 1340 the rules were changed – thereafterthe 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 bridgebetween the central government and the local
(08:03):
administration and could function to transmitinformation to the crown.
Why, if they weren’t being paid, would peoplewant to be coroners?
Some historians believe that people didn’treally want to be coroners and that those
who were selected did as little work as possible.
But I think the surviving rolls suggest alevel of diligence.
(And here, I’ve actually linked to the MurderMaps of London, Oxford, and York where teams
(08:26):
of historians have mapped out the cases foundin the coroners’ rolls in those cities – they
have also included modernized translationsof the coroner’s rolls on that site so you
can actually look at them and let us knowwhat you think.)
Others have assumed that coroners might haveextracted bribes to compensate them for their
time – but there’s not a lot of evidenceto support their position.
I happen to agree with Sara Butler that officeholdingin the Middle Ages offered its own rewards
(08:51):
that were not necessarily linked to compensation.
Men might have chosen to hold office becausedoing so enhanced their standing and influence.
Or maybe they held office because they prioritizedthe good of their community and felt that
holding office was an honorable thing to do.
I imagine that there might also have beenpeople then, just as there are today, who
simply liked being at the center of the action, in the metaphorical room where it happens – and
(09:13):
that desire might have been enough to motivatethem to hold office even if it didn’t pay
anything.
Of course, now I’ve wandered into the realmsof 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 coronersdid keep records – and when they survive
they are absolutely fascinating.
They’re full of detail and life (or maybeI should say of death).
(09:36):
But not all of those deaths were violent – oneof 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 tenementand 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 courtswere aware of local crimes.
(09:58):
After that the rolls did not need to be preservedand some of them may have been regarded as
the personal property of the coroners whomade them which is not exactly a recipe for
preservation.
That said, there is some evidence that therolls were highly valued at the time, at least
until they were copied over.
One of the preserved coroners’ rolls fromNorwich tells the story of two coroners who,
having investigated two deaths, sat togetherin one of their homes to compile the notes.
(10:22):
A gang then arrived outside of the house anddemanded that they destroy their records if
they did not want to be chopped into tinypieces.
The coroners refused but eventually the gangbroke in and dragged one of the coroners from
the premises.
They then found his roll which had been hiddenunder his clothes and destroyed it.
This story demonstrates to me that some coronersat least took their jobs seriously and sought
(10:43):
to protect the integrity of their work evenat great personal cost.
Or at least that’s what they wanted us tothink.
There are records of medical processionalslooking 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 whatexactly it entails have changed over time,
(11:04):
the fundamental reason for the coroner hasbeen 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 todayand if you’d like to learn more about medieval
officials reach out to our team and let meknow because I’d love to tell you all about
(11:26):
constables, and sheriffs, and even streetsweepers.
Until next time, remember, the best storiesare always in the footnotes.
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