The practice of investigating suspicious deaths is, presumably, only very slightly younger than the advent of causing them—that is to say, it’s very, very old. As long as people have lived in close quarters, we’ve wanted to know what happened to our neighbors, so it’s no surprise that death investigators have been around for centuries. Still, as rapidly and as far as investigative methods have progressed over those centuries, it seems unlikely that a death investigator from even two hundred years in the past would recognize much of anything in their modern counterpart. What was the equivalent of a coroner, two hundred years ago? How about five hundred? Or eight hundred?

           This may feel like a trick question—and it is. The answer is the same for all of them, and the answer is that the office of the coroner was first established in 1194 and has never left.  

Coroners, in their initial form, were first established by the English government as the “custos placitorum coronae”, the ‘keepers of pleas of the crown’, and investigating deaths was only part of their original role. As representatives of the Crown, they were roughly equivalent to the Federal investigators of Richard I’s England, investigating any and all crimes against the crown’s laws and interests, with a very specific goal in mind— the same one you think of whenever you get a ticket from a State Trooper: making money for the government. 

           Richard Lionheart is famous as a leader of the Third Crusade, but perhaps less known (as he’d no doubt prefer) for his ignominious return from it, when he was caught traveling in disguise and taken prisoner by his own former allies, whom he’d offended during the war, then ransomed back to his own country. How much is a king’s ransom? In this case, it was as much over again as England had raised for the Crusade itself. That, understandably, was a lot of money to tax out of the populace in a short amount of time— and immediately after his incredible ransom was paid, he returned to begin preparing for another war, this one to reclaim control of Normandy. (Perhaps we can sympathize with his brother John, who had privately written to Richard’s captor and asked if he’d be willing to just keep Richard for a while, instead. The request was refused.) 

           The English Crown in 1194 was waist-deep in the financial hole and very much still digging. Thus: the coroner. At the time referred to interchangeably as “crowners”, “coronators”, or “coroners” from their service to the crown (via their Latin job description—think ‘coronation’), they were equipped with the power to protect the king’s interests, investigate crimes, fine lawbreakers, and seize the assets of those involved in particularly high-level offenses—offenses, of course, like murder. In many instances, unclaimed or undocumented property or money legally belonged to the king, but since the king wasn’t likely to be around, it didn’t always make its way to his royal coffers. If it was ever reported in the first place, there was little to stop the local authorities from opening their pockets and closing their mouths, without a coroner involved. 

           That made up the second side of their role: these early coroners weren’t solely tasked with investigating profitable murders and giving ye olde parking tickets—they also served as a check to the law-enforcing power of the local sheriff (if you think the office of coroner is old, consider that a sheriff has been enforcing the law in a shire—an administrative area analogous to a county—for so long that the word “sheriff” itself derives from “shire” by way of Old English, thanks to the Anglo-Saxons). When the local sheriff had a financial interest in a case, or someone had a complaint about the sheriff, the coroner would step in. If you were a particularly legalistically-minded child and ever wondered why no one had the oversight to keep Robin Hood’s nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, from abusing his position, the answer is that he was less than five years away from a rude awakening in those stories, when the coroner’s office would be created, and the coroner would become the one person who could arrest the sheriff just as well as anyone else. As royal law enforcers and investigators, it makes sense that they would have jurisdiction to investigate and penalize local sheriffs, but oddly enough, that very specific aspect of the office actually survives in some places—namely Georgia, Colorado, and Indiana, where the County Coroner is still the only public official who can arrest the Sheriff. 

           Over time, many of the other legal and judicial duties of the coroners were redistributed to other officials, like justices of the peace, but the investigation of suspicious deaths has remained their purview for centuries. In the 21st century, on discovery of a murder victim, one’s legal duty is generally to call the police. In the 12th century, it was to “raise hue and cry” and form a search party to hunt for the killer— and to call for the police— but over 800 years later, in over half the jurisdictions in America, two things are still true: when a body is found, the coroner will be called out to investigate; and if the coroner thinks you failed to report a murder, you may get to pay the government a hefty fine.