Darcie Wilde | The Regency Coroner

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Let Us Praise Mr. John Impey of the Inner Temple

There’s a saying about the past; it’s another country and they do things
differently there. That means that authors and amateur historians all owe debts
of gratitude to those brave souls who penned the travel guides.

This becomes really clear when you’re researching the law and policing.

Before 1828, England did not have a professional police force administered by
the government. In fact, the ruling elite actively resisted the creation of any
such institution. They insisted it would be an infringement on the traditional
freedoms of Englishmen. As an example, they pointed to Napoleon and his secret
police (who were, to be fair, really bad).

This freewheeling attitude created a lot of headaches back in the day. It
created more than a few for me as I was trying to do my research for the
Rosalind Thorne mysteries.

In 1817, when my books, A USEFUL WOMAN and A PURELY PRIVATE MATTER take place, London was on its way to becoming the biggest, and wealthiest, city in the Western World. Despite this, crime prevention and investigation was performed by a really loose patchwork of institutions. In fact to call it a patchwork is an insult to patchwork, which is beautiful, artistic, economical and holds together really well.

A Useful Woman #1 Amazon.com BN.com iTunes/iBooks Kobo Google Play

A Purely Private Matter #2 Amazon.com BN.com iTunes/iBooks Kobo Google Play

Under the English non-system, who was responsible for what depended not only on
the type of crime, but on where the crime happened. Here’s just a few of the
possibilities:

Crimes on the roads to and from London, for instance, were handled by the
Highway and Horse Patrols (if Parliament felt like funding them in any given year).

Smuggling and theft from ships on the Thames was handled by the River Police.

General security of the streets (such as it was) was the province of the
underpaid, understaffed and distinctly amateur City Watch (night and day varieties).

“Constables” were anybody who could be hired by private individuals or the
magistrates courts and had duties closer to a body guard’s than a policeman’s.

How about theft? Well. Unless it was on the King’s Highway, or the Thames, the
individual citizen was kind of on his own. If, for example, your shop got
robbed, you had to advertise for the return of the property (and people did,
usually offering a reward, or stating “no questions asked”). You could hire
someone to try to track it, and the criminal down. This gave rise to the
profession of the “thief-taker” and all its notorious corruption. Which included
thief-takers doing things like robbing places themselves and then turning the
goods back in for the reward.

Debt was a huge issue, and forgery was a hanging offense, but prosecution for
either had to arise from private complaints to the magistrates and it had an
entire separate court and jail system (and don’t get me started on the concept
of the “spongeing house,” which is a whole ‘nother post).

Things were different in Scotland.

Things were really different in Ireland.

This tangle left me feeling like I was going to have to recourse to my fainting
couch and smelling salts. I was saved by a most unlikely hero, one Mr. John
Impey of the Inner Temple.

Mr. Impey’s Wikipedia page (of course he has one) is short. This is kind of ironic, because although little was written about him, Impey himself wrote a lot — opinions, histories, and articles. In addition, Impey is the guy who literally wrote the book on the Georgian legal system. Actually, he wrote several books. One of them was The Practice of the Office of the Coroner (not it’s full title, which takes up pretty much a whole page, and would be a blog post in and of itself). I found my copy on Google Play Books. Office of the Coroner is not a light read. But for the history geek, or a historical writer, it’s not just a roadmap, it's an atlas. The very through and dedicated Mr. Impey covers the history of the office and the types of coroner, who can be a coroner, and how they are selected, and paid. There’s stuff on how a jury is selected, sworn in and how they should discharge their duties. There’re also sections on what constitutes corruption in a coroner (!), and what kinds of deaths they should investigate, and (oh, bless your pedantic quill, Mr. Impey!) how the investigations should be carried out.

Impey also explains why the office of the Coroner exists at all, and why murder
is treated differently from…pretty much every other crime.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, most criminal activity was
considered as some sort of threat to private property. That meant, according to
the thinking of the time, the private individual affected should decide what to
do about it. Violence toward another person, though, was a breach of the King’s
Peace. This made it an offense against the Crown, and so it was the legitimate
business of the King’s government to find and punish the malefactor.

So, it’s in the Coroner’s office we find the roots of what we’d recognize as the
modern criminal justice system, pretty much from soup to nuts. The Coroner was
supposed to visit the scene of the crime, find and interview witnesses to the
crime, inspect the corpse, swear in a jury, hear and record all the evidence,
and get an official verdict. He could hire all the help he needed for this,
including officers from Bow Street or another police office. He was, in short, a
one-man homicide squad.

The system also provided a lovely, and rare high road through the dark woods of
Regency-era criminal law.

So, my thanks, Mr. Impey, wherever you are, for clearing the way and leaving the
lantern burning. A glass of wine with you, Sir.