The Coroners of Northern Britain c. 1300-1700

R. Houston

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137381071
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

For the last 800 years coroners have been important in England's legal and political landscape, best known as investigators of sudden, suspicious, or unexplained death. Against the background of the coroner's role in historic England, this book explains how sudden death was investigated by magistrates in Scotland.

1

Coroners in England, Wales and Ireland: An Overview of the Development of Their Roles

Abstract: English coroners originated in the twelfth century. This chapter summarises the subsequent development of their different legal and administrative roles over time in England, Wales and Ireland, charting how a figure with high social status and broad judicial functions, who helped the flow of justice and protected the king’s financial interests, gradually became confined to presiding over inquests, before juries, into sudden, suspicious or unexplained deaths. The development of a peripatetic royal judiciary holding assize courts and an active county magistracy (Justices of the Peace) made the power of coroners over anything except determining causes of death largely vestigial by the fifteenth century; it also diminished their social standing. The chapter gives examples of how deaths were reported, how inquests operated and how coroners were appointed and remunerated, mostly in England.

Houston, R. A. The Coroners of Northern Britain c. 1300–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137381071.0006.

‘[L]ong regarded as a quiet and curious backwater of the English legal system’, the workings of coroners’ inquests and the duties of the coroner are nevertheless quite well understood.¹ From 1194 the English crown charged coroners with investigating sudden or suspicious deaths, to determine whether the cause was natural, accidental or through human agency.² English coroners were royal officials who sat with a jury ‘on the view of’ a corpse (they had to see it); inquests were held before them rather than by coroners. A dead body subject to a coroner’s inquest required his warrant before it could legally be buried. More broadly, coroners tackled serious crime and protected royal financial rights; they recorded their work in a separate roll of the pleas of the crown (‘Corone’ – hence Coroner) as a check on the sheriff.³ All private criminal accusations (appeals) made in the county court had to go through a coroner as part of the procedure; the coroner supervised sanctuary and abjuration of felons until 1623; he took evidence from felons (turned ‘approvers’) against other felons; he had to attend gaol delivery sessions; he had the power to bind over suspects and witnesses to appear at general eyres or, from the fourteenth century, assizes; he could commit to prison or to trial; he secured the chattels of convicted felons.⁴

This last point is often ignored, yet it remained potentially an important expectation of coroners until the abolition of forfeiture for felony in England in 1872.⁵ ‘By the common law, after a felon be found guilty before the Coroner ... there the Coroner, Sheriff, undersheriff, or Escheator, etc. may (for the King) seise the goods of the felon, and praise them by an Inquest, etc. ... for by such thing found before the Coroner, the goods of the Felon are forfeited without further inquiry ... and yet the Officer may not in such case carry the Felons goods away, but ... must leave them in the custody of the Felons Neighbours ... to be answered to the King’.⁶ Though the court was one of inquiry rather than prosecution, an appropriate finding was itself sufficient authority for criminal proceedings; the coroner could return indictments based on his own inquest or coming from a jury of presentment.⁷ Elizabethan commentator Sir Thomas Smyth described the return as ‘in the nature of an indictment, which is not a full condemnation’.⁸

Late-seventeenth-century writers on judicial practice, such as William Nelson, noted that officers generally secured goods after the arrest of a living person on suspicion of felony, partly to prevent their disposal and partly to ensure the accused had material support while awaiting trial – which might take place days, weeks or even months later.⁹ Until conviction, an accused felon could dispose of assets as they wished, but fraudulent transfer to frustrate the crown was illegal. In the words of the Privy Council, writing to Sheriff Sir Nicholas Bacon in 1604, a seizure should occur ‘in such sort as there may be no fraud committed by embezzling, or by lawful conveyance of’ the assets in question.¹⁰

In most other regards coroners’ remits shrank from c.1300 until, from Tudor times, they mainly investigated sudden or suspicious death. By that stage, constitutional writers could rationalise coroners quite differently from their initial conception. For Sir Thomas Smyth, writing in 1583, ‘this name commeth because that the death of everie subject by violence is accounted to touch the crowne of the Prince, and to be a detriment to it, the Prince accounting that his strength, power, and crowne doth stande and consist in the force of his people, and the maintenance of them in securitie and peace’.¹¹ Elizabethan and Jacobean legal authorities too dealt only with the investigation of death.¹² Had they fulfilled their original purpose, English coroners would have superseded (for example) court leet juries entirely in preliminary enquiries into felonies and also perhaps taken over the presentment of felons to the general eyres.¹³ Henry II’s reforms had removed the pleas of the crown from the sheriffs and placed them exclusively with justices in the king’s household or commissioned by the king, the coroner recording accusations and pleadings between eyres so that trials could proceed swiftly when the judges arrived. The focus on dead bodies came out of Norman interest in the murder of fellow countrymen and because homicide was an important source of forfeiture, the coroner listing and thus asserting and protecting the king’s rights.¹⁴ Magna Carta confirmed the reduced power of English sheriffs and a statute of 1461 (1 Ed. IV, c. 2) forced them to notify a felony to Justices of the Peace (JPs) rather than to move against the suspect themselves; in criminal matters coroners’ rolls became more authoritative as a record in the thirteenth century and the coroner had already superseded the sheriff in important judicial and administrative roles by 1307.¹⁵ Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, the English sheriff ‘evolved from a regional dictator with true executive authority into a tightly regulated bureaucrat whose chief administrative purpose was to respond to a multiplicity of royal writs’.¹⁶

English sheriffs had largely ceased to be hereditary in the twelfth century.¹⁷ For their part, late medieval and later coroners were normally appointed for life. Over time, the rise of the Commission of the Peace meant that JPs, who were usually of higher status than coroners, came to have greater responsibility for the peace-keeping aspects of coroners’ work.¹⁸ The same practical supersession explains the earlier decline of serjeants of the peace, ‘a body of officers, both royal and baronial, specially entrusted with the preservation of peace, the repression of crime, and the execution of the orders of the courts of justice. Those duties included making arrests and distraints, the placing of persons under attachment by sureties to appear for trial, the services of summonses, the carrying of official messages, and the collection of some of the profits of jurisdiction.’¹⁹ At the same time, the demise of English justices in eyre during the thirteenth century, gone by 1265 to be replaced by justices of the Benches, cemented the lesser role.²⁰ ‘The office of coroner was at its zenith in the second half of the thirteenth century.’²¹ Together, a peripatetic royal judiciary and an active county magistracy made the power of coroners over anything except sudden death largely vestigial by the fifteenth century, except (as will become clear) in the north of England.²² Where coroners had once kept the pleas of the crown across the realm, commissioners of the peace came to hold and determine them. A decrease in appeals of felony, and abolition of outlawry and of the murdrum fine (1340; this was a sanction against a subdivision of a shire called a ‘hundred’, in cases where the killer of a murdered man could not be identified) further rendered aspects of their existing duties obsolete by the end of the Middle Ages.

Alongside contracting functions went diminishing status. Writing in the mid-eighteenth century, jurist William Blackstone believed that an early English coroner had to be a knight with an estate ‘sufficient to maintain the dignity of his office, and answer any fines that may be set upon him for his misbehaviour’. As originally conceived in 1194 each shire had four coroners, of whom three had to be knights and one a clerk, but knighthood was no longer a qualification by the end of the fourteenth century. Thus Blackstone, following the judge Matthew Hale and Middlesex coroner Edward Umfreville (and legislation of 1732 establishing a property qualification for English and Welsh JPs), opined that ‘through the culpable neglect of gentle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The History of Coroners in Britain
• 1  Coroners in England, Wales and Ireland: An Overview of the Development of Their Roles
• 2  Investigating Sudden Death in Scotland: The Task of Local Magistrates
• 3  Scottish Coroners: Origins and Development of the Office to c.1500
• 4  Scottish Coroners from c.1500 until Their Disappearance in the Eighteenth Century
• 5  Regional and National Histories: Similarities and Differences between the Coroners of Northern Britain
• Conclusion: Coroners and British History
• Select Bibliography
• Index