The Conquest of Death by Matthew Lockwood

Author:Matthew Lockwood [Lockwood, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300217063
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

SIX

The Changing Nature of Control

DESPITE THE WISHES OF BOTH historians and their subjects, history rarely unfolds in a straightforward, progressive manner. The gains and developments of one era are often followed by losses, setbacks, and decline. Those who view the early modern period as an era of untrammeled centralization and bureaucratization must bow to the reality that historical change is rarely that simple. The period between 1530 and 1640 did indeed witness a growing centralization of oversight of the coroner system, and with it the first effective state monopoly of lethal violence in England. This restriction of violence through centralized surveillance, however, did not remain static throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, political and economic realities intervened to disrupt the system of oversight and potentially threaten the monopoly of violence first created in the sixteenth century.

The robust central oversight of the coroner system achieved by means of forfeiture litigation contested in the central courts and spearheaded by the royal almoner from the 1530s began to erode by the middle of the seventeenth century. Star Chamber, as we have seen, was one of the chief venues for forfeiture litigation and one of the foremost instruments used by the almoner to challenge forfeiture decisions, thereby regulating suspicious death and its investigative officers. This vital instrument for the control of violence, however, was abolished in 1641 in the chaotic political and legal climate of the period of the Civil Wars, as part of the campaign against royal centralization and the prerogative power of the monarchy.1 The office of the almoner, likewise a symbol of the arbitrary royal government and episcopal church structure hated by many who sided with Parliament, was also targeted. The office remained vacant between 1640 and 1660, meaning that both the principal agent of forfeiture litigation and one of the principal venues for such action were nonexistent in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.2 Although royal almoners were again appointed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and still made occasional use of the remaining central courts in the late seventeenth century, the amount of forfeiture litigation in the central courts did not again reach the levels seen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The proportion of coroners’ inquests that resulted in litigation in King’s Bench also fell from the middle of the seventeenth century. With the precipitous decline of forfeiture litigation in the central courts, a vital aspect of the surveillance regime was undermined.

This chapter will explore the roots of the erosion of central oversight of the coroner system and the concomitant decline of forfeiture litigation, but it is not simply a story of decline, nor of a return to the past. The second half of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly a time of crisis for state and citizen alike. The chaos and uncertainty of the era were no doubt at least partially responsible for shifting the gaze of the state away from the regulation of violence and toward other, more pressing political and military agendas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.