Conclusion

The conclusion reiterates the centrality of the coroner system and its oversight in the monopolization of violence, state formation, and the growth of state power by creating and delineating new definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence. It also examines the resulting decline of extra-judicial violence—blood feud, vendetta etc.—and subsequent attempts by the English state to target and control non-lethal forms of non-state violence such as riot and assault. Finally, the conclusion offers some initial comparisons with continental Europe and suggests that the trends seen in England may have been mirrored by similar attempts to monopolize violence in the Holy Roman Empire.

Economic Interest and the Oversight of Violence

While, earlier chapters establish that the officer and investigative techniques necessary to create a monopoly of violence were in place in England by the beginning of the sixteenth century, these alone only provided the potential for the effective regulation of violence. To ensure that the state’s definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence were rigorously enforced, oversight of the coroner system was necessary. Chapter 5, therefore, charts the rise of a new, more robust system of oversight that came into effect in the sixteenth century. The growth of oversight, it is argued, began in the 1530s as a result of competing economic interests in the outcome of coroners’ inquests and the growing popularity of the central courts as a venue for adjudication. This combination of economic interest in forfeiture and greater central court involvement in forfeiture disputes resulted in a system of surveillance which allowed central government officials unprecedented control over the coroner system and thus, for the first time, an effective monopoly of lethal violence.

Introduction

The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier scholars have focused almost entirely on the state’s ability to engage in active warfare and have thus neglected an important aspect of the monopoly of violence, the restriction of non-state or illegitimate violence. The introduction also explores the medieval background of the coroner system, the mechanism designed to regulate violence in England and explains why the system had failed to achieve its proposed ends prior to the sixteenth century.

A Crisis of Violence?

The rise of a new, more effective system of oversight in the mid-sixteenth century has many implications for early modern society and for the history of crime. Some of these implications, are investigated in chapter 8, primarily the impact of the new oversight and the subsequent growth in record keeping for the history of homicide. The chapter argues that while previous historians have detected a sharp increase in homicide in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, this growth in violence is, in fact a mirage. These years did not witness an appreciable rise in homicide, but instead saw a growth in detection and record-keeping spurred by greater central oversight of the coroner system.

Restricting Private Warfare

One aspect of an effective monopoly of violence is the elimination of private warfare and the power of individuals to raise armies against the state or their neighbors. Chapter 1 outlines the process by which the private power projection of the medieval aristocracy, so central to operation of medieval warfare but also the cause of instability, was restricted in the years following the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses. The chapter demonstrates how laws against retaining, the creation of regional royal councils, the invention of a fixed court, the trend away from feudal armies and the regulation of rights of assembly all contributed to the elimination of non-state warfare in England in the years between 1485 and 1569. With the threat of violence from over-mighty subjects effectively removed by the middle of the sixteenth century, the sole requirement for a true monopoly of violence became the regulation of non-judicial and inter-personal violence.

The Changing Nature of Control

The robust central oversight of the coroner system achieved in the 1530s began to erode by the middle of the seventeenth century. Chapter 6 explores the possible causes for this erosion in central oversight of the coroner system and the concomitant decline of forfeiture litigation. The second half of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly a time of crisis for state and citizen alike and the chaos and uncertainty of the era was no doubt at least partially responsible for shifting the gaze of the state away from the regulation of violence and towards other, more pressing political and military agendas. And yet, while the effects of such political and legal instability on the regular oversight of the legal system is demonstrated, it is also shown that even in an age of crisis the coroner system and the regulation of violence continued to operate. Inured to a system of justice, coroners and communities continued to hold their inquests and culpability for violent death continued to be determined. The eyes of the central government may not have been fixed on the coroner system as strongly as before, but criminal death was still punished and the monopoly of violence maintained.

One Concept of Justice

Chapter 4 explores the coroners’ jury, its makeup, its purpose and its relationship with the coroner. This section contends that the structure of the early modern coroners’ jury indicates that it was designed to provide the coroners’ inquest with local knowledge and expertise at the same time that it incorporated checks on the potential biases of local residents charged with investigating their neighbors. Focusing primarily on trial juries, traditional interpretations of early modern English judicial tribunals have highlighted their function as a site of negotiation between state and local society and between central and peripheral conceptions of justice. By examining a wider range of juries the chapter stresses the early modern jury's function as a site of state control. In an era with few official judicial officers, the effective maintenance of order required local information and local knowledge. In order to secure this crucial information without sacrificing state control over justice, a strategy of jury composition which blended geographical diversity with status qualifications was employed. Thus, the seeming contradiction in the early modern legal system witnessed by historians and contemporaries alike between discretion and impartiality was in fact a method of obtaining much needed local information without ceding the state's definition of justice to peripheral interests.

Proving the Case

The chapter argues that over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, medical testimony was increasingly sought in coroners’ inquests and that by at least the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries medical knowledge and forensic medicine was already sophisticated enough to provide an accurate assessment of the majority of medical evidence that was regularly encountered. However, it is further argued that forensic medicine and medical testimony, even when perfectly competent and accurate, were in no way necessary for effective policing or criminal investigation. Instead, it is demonstrated that, then as now, a combination of local knowledge, communal policing and witness testimony was the key to effective policing and criminal investigation. Thus, even if forensic medicine was not sufficiently advanced by the sixteenth century to detect all violent deaths, the crucial tools for effective regulation of lethal violence—witnesses’ testimony and communal knowledge—were in place throughout the early modern period. As such, the question of whether or not the primitive nature early modern forensic medicine was a barrier to the effective regulation of inter-personal violence is immaterial. Instead, the chapter concludes that criminal investigation was efficient and effective enough to maintain the state’s monopoly of violence.

Legislation, Incentivization, and a New System of Oversight

Although the locus of oversight had shifted to the localities in the late-seventeenth century, this move did not spell the end of effective oversight of the violent death. In response to a perceived crisis of crime and violence, legislation was enacted in the mid-eighteenth century which reinvigorated the surveillance of the English coroner system. The decision in 1752 to alter the payment structure for coroners not only spurred coroners to greater activity than in the previous decades, but it also provided new opportunities and sources for monitoring the regulation of violence. Chapter 8 highlights the social and political context of the mid-eighteenth century reforms and argues that the measures introduced to pay coroners by the inquest and by the mile in 1752 both reduced inaction among coroners and allowed new avenue for control of the system by producing a new set of competing economic interests and new written sources of surveillance.

Coroners and Communities

If we are to fully understand the process through which a monopoly of violence was established in early modern England, it is first crucial to understand the nature of the office that was created for the express purpose of detecting and investigating inter-personal violence. As such, chapter 1 examines the parameters of the office of the coroner in both theory and practice. Using legal treatises and office holding manuals as well as a variety of local records, the chapter explores the duties and responsibilities of the coroner both legally and in reality, before moving to a discussion of the various jurisdictions within which coroners operated. As coroners were elected officials, chapter 2 also examines the election process and argues that the position of coroner was eagerly sought and the election of coroners contested and often contentious. If violence was to be effectively regulated, it was crucial that coroners interacted productively and efficiently with the communities they policed as well as the officers and courts of the legal system more generally. In order to properly situate the coroner in this dynamic apparatus, this chapter will examine both the process of a coroner’s inquest—from discovery, to inquest, to trial—and the coroner’s role in and interactions with communities, constables, justices of the peace and the local and central courts