This chapter contains practical advice on how to write a statement for an inquest.

The purpose of a pre-inquest review hearing is explored in this chapter.

Medical practitioners have a statutory duty to notify the coroner, where the doctor suspects a ‘notifiable cause’ of death and where one considers a death ‘suspicious’, the police must also be informed immediately. This chapter explores the duties of the medical examiner and the duty of the coroner to investigate.

The theme of safe-guarding, accidents and death is demonstrated by reference to the bishops’ advice regarding the protection of babies, and the necessary measures to be taken in case of illness and death, including emergency baptism and Caesarean section. Accidents often occurred, especially to children, and this might lead, in more fortunate cases, to healing and even revival by means of a miracle. Miracle accounts are balanced by coroners’ accounts which record the details of death, often by misadventure, as in the case here of a young woman scalded to death by falling into a brewer’s vat.

Focused on confession, Chapter 5 opens with a vignette in which a royal justice prods a first-time criminal defendant to confess to being a horse thief. The chapter argues that medieval English culture was imbued with the practice of confession, which occurred not only in the ecclesiastical context but was also a central part of felony procedure. Moreover, it demonstrates that the priest-confessor’s art of circumstantial inquiry, designed to ensure that a person confessed his or her sins fully to receive the appropriate penance, was adapted and adopted by the king’s coroners, who undertook an inquiry into the facts underlying homicide offenses. Downplaying the English exceptionalist narrative of the diverging paths in criminal procedure in England and continental Europe after Lateran IV, the chapter emphasizes the central role played by confession in medieval English felony procedure.