Walking with the dead: coronial law and spatial justice in the necropolis

The modern history of the coronial institution paints a grim portrait of the plight of the dead. Where the dead were found on a public street, the coroner would carry the corpse from one public house to another, hoping to find a hospitable innkeeper willing to let a room for holding an inquest or at least an outbuilding for storage until a hearing could be held. Where the dead were found in a prison or a hospital without a mortuary, the coroner would transform a cell or a ward into a makeshift morgue. The footprints of the coroner determined the itineraries of the dead. They unravelled a map that bore the traces of legal relations between the living and the dead. In walking through the city, in the performance of his role, the coroner not only carried corpses upon his shoulders, he wrote their histories and biographies, he collected their memories and legacies.1 In ambulating through alleyways and strolling along promenades, in the routes he walked and the trajectories he followed, the coroner gathered material for a history yet to be written; a history of how techniques of walking cultivated a lawful place for the dead in the modern necropolis.