Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England by Sarah M. Butler (review)

Those who study homicide and accidental death in England are fortunate to have the records of coroners, whose primary responsibility was to investigate sudden and unnatural, and violent deaths. The Continent has no equivalent. The coroners’ inquests are a rich source for social history, as I have used them in my own research, legal history, and with Sarah Butler’s book, medical history. Butler’s book is perhaps more of a legal history than a medical history, but for those interested in investigation into violent death and even some illnesses, the book offers interesting insights. Her thesis is that, lacking trained physicians serving as coroners or on coroners’ juries, the process at the inquests was often thorough. The body of the victim provided most of the information, along with witnesses.

The introduction has the ungainliness of a dissertation, listing the scholars whom she admires and perhaps with whom she wishes to ingratiate herself. They are all legal historians, not medical historians. But the reader should persevere. The first chapter is a legal history background about the office of the coroner in England gleaned from legal treatises. Outstanding in this chapter is her prosopography identifying who the coroners were. They were not medical specialists—medieval universities trained their medical specialists in texts not practice—but rather career public servants. Many came from families who provided municipalities and counties with coroners, sheriffs, and bailiffs. Why would one want to take on a difficult and at times repugnant office without pay? Perhaps coroners were reimbursed through corruption, as were all these volunteer peacekeepers in medieval England.

To try to connect the legal to the medical part of her book, she has looked at the jurors in chapter 2. Using London and York, the largest and the second largest cities in England, she found the lay medical practitioners—apothecaries, barbers, spicers—on juries. Rural inquisitions relied on peasants who certainly knew accidental deaths and accidents, having witnessed many. They often knew of circumstances leading to particular homicides. This knowledge could lead to lenience in convictions. I discovered in my own research in the gaol delivery rolls that only 12 percent of the homicide indictments led to convictions.

Chapter 3, on the process of investigation, is of interest given that the juries, witnesses, and coroners looked mostly at the naked body to find cause-of-death evidence. For drowning, for instance, the coroner was to sit on the body to see if water came from the lungs, indicating drowning not previous death.

The medical dimensions of the inquests are discussed chapter 4. In pursuing the presence of disease in the inquests, Butler has looked at cases of assault in which death was attributable to disease rather than wounds, abortion by assault, insanity. She seems to be confused about abortion being homicide. Bracton wrote that it was, but there is no statute to that effect, and infanticide was not a crime until the seventeenth century. On the other hand, her discussion of insanity is very well researched. Likewise in chapter 4, Butler has used the coroners’ inquests that attributed death to illness to good effect. She has tied the symptoms to known diseases and provides a table for the diseases. Epilepsy, pestilence, senescence are all documented with cases. Can comments about absence of friends and family at the time of death really be regarded as “taunts” by the jurors (p. 109)?

The book has a number of weaknesses. It jumps around chronologically from Anglo-Saxon England to the thirteenth century, the fourteenth century, and beyond. Butler offers no sense of change over time. Examples are cherry-picked so that there is no statistical context for the incidents cited. A note on methodology and sources would have helped. “Conviction” and “indictment” are used interchangeably. Inquests made only indictments. Butler makes a number of assumptions about the motivation of jurors and coroners that simply cannot be confirmed...