In 1381, when the people of St Albans took down the bodies gibbeted there in the aftermath of the Great Revolt, the king ordered them to return the decomposing bodies to the gibbet with their own hands. Thomas Walsingham describes this as a rather odious task as the bodies ‘were now oozing with decay, swarming with worms, were putrid and stinking, and exuding their foul odour upon them’. The rotting bodies in contention at St Albans were the final act in a theatre of justice, which was why Richard II insisted they be returned to the gibbet. For in late medieval England rebels were not considered fully punished nor finally dead until their bodies had decayed into nothingness – and that took time.

For modern man in the twenty-first century there are many faces of death: brain death, cardiac death or the slow death of the self that comes with dementia; but for the bureau of records there is only one death that matters – the one recorded on the death certificate. That death is given a very discrete moment in time, which is then recorded in the public record, but those of us who have signed these certificates know that the time of death on the official record is more arbitrary than it may at first appear.