Stone, in that county, said, "I was under the impression the body was not to be touched till the police came." The Coroner was much surprised (not being a folklorist), and rightly commented upon the absurdity of the idea. But is it so absurd? It is admittedly an inaccurate and highly inconvenient notion, but I cannot help feeling that its source lies far back in mediaeval criminal procedure. If so, there is here provided an excellent example of the stubbornness of traditional knowledge. Under the criminal law as it stood in the first three centuries after the Norman Conquest there was in the case of any unexplained death a certain presumption of guilt upon the first finder of the dead body, who was compelled to attend at the inquest. The following extracts from the Staffordshire Assize Roll of Henry III. will illustrate the procedure: "Thomas the miller, of Burton, and Richard his son, were drowned while conveying turf in a boat on the water of the Trent. Henry son of Ralph was the first finder. Nobody is suspected." Or this: "Nicholas, son of William de Oaken, through madness fell on the wheel of a mill so that he died. Henry the miller is the first finder and is not suspected. Henry did not appear, therefore his sureties are fined half a mark."
So then it was manifestly a prudent thing to let someone else be the first finder of a dead body. Now, a man who pulls a dead body out of the river stamps himself at once as the first finder: at any rate he runs great risk of being found in the act. The prudent man of the Middle Ages left someone else to do this, for fear lest he should be put to the inconvenience of clearing himself from a crime he had not committed. His descendant to-day, impelled, as I believe, by an inherited memory of mediaeval coroner's law, leaves the police to be the first to touch a dead body.
