Between 4 and 5 one October morning in 1559, Dorothy Cawthorn got up from her bed and went into the kitchen of her widowed mistress Mary Evers' house at Belton in Lincolnshire. She broke a hole in the wall and made her way out into the hop garden. There, she went over to the 5-feet-deep pond, fell in, and drowned. These bald details of an everyday tragedy come from one of some 9000 16th-century coroners' inquests into accidental deaths in England, which we are investigating. Without the inquest report for this drowning on October 19, we would know nothing of Dorothy Cawthorn; her death can tell us a lot about the world she lived in.

When set alongside the other reports from coroners' inquests, these accounts tell us much about the major hazards to life and health faced by Dorothy Cawthorn's generation: drowning, for example, accounted for about half of all accidental deaths. When read questioningly, the reports reveal aspects of the social and material circumstances of her life. How could she smash a hole in the wall? Presumably it was made of wattle and daub or lath and plaster rather than stone or brick. Why did a household living in such flimsy accommodation have servants? Domestic service was common even in quite humble households and the Elizabethan wave of rebuilding farmhouses in stone had barely begun. Why did Dorothy Cawthorn go to the pond? Outside the main cities, piped or pumped water was rare and wells, ponds, rivers, or streams were the main sources of water for domestic use. Finally, Dorothy Cawthorn's death can tell us something of her contemporaries' experience and understanding of death and disease. She was, the inquest report tells us, “ill with a certain quotidian fever…such that she behaved herself as though demented, in so much as she did not know what she was doing or saying”. Presumably it was the fever that made her desperate for a drink and her altered state that drove her to seek it in such a dramatic way. The fever might have been malarial, for Belton was in the marshy Isle of Axholme. Or perhaps her illness was part of the wave of epidemics that reduced the population sharply in 1557–59, which is often thought to be when influenza first appeared in England.

Coroners in Tudor England, who had been appointed since the 12th century and had some legal but no medical training, were supposed to hold inquests on all sudden, unexpected, or violent deaths. They called together a jury who gave a narrative account of the victim's death and classified it as a murder, a suicide, an accident, or an act of God. We cannot now tell whether every death really was looked into—it seems some coroners were more efficient than others—and we cannot second-guess the jury's verdict on, for example, which drownings were accidental and which suicidal. But since juries had to return credible accounts of death, could be prosecuted for untrue verdicts, and sometimes broke up and reconvened once they had found out what they needed to know, we can depend on their evidence enough to cast some light on the hazards people faced in their daily lives.

The range of activities in which people were engaged when they met their untimely ends was extraordinarily wide. In the coroners' inquest reports we have examined, work accounted for about half of all accidents and travel another quarter, with most of the remaining quarter split between activities involving leisure and personal hygiene. Some kinds of work that are still dangerous now were dangerous then: farming, building, and mining. Other occupations were proportionately much more so because of the nature of the economy or of social arrangements. One work accident in ten involved caring for horses, although cattle, pigs, deer, and even sheep accounted for some fatalities. One working death in seven resulted from cutting or carrying wood for timber or firewood. One in nine, with victims overwhelmingly female, involved fetching water from open sources like Dorothy Cawthorn's pond. Children also perished at work whilst engaged in such tasks as driving carts, carrying sacks of malt, or taking horses to water: the inquest reports show that for those aged 7–13 years a third of deaths were work-related.

Occupational health was regionalised across England in ways we might still recognise: accidents involving coal, for instance, were concentrated in Yorkshire and the north Midlands. But it was also seasonal in ways now unfamiliar. October was the characteristic month for falling out of trees while trying to beat down acorns to fatten pigs for slaughter. Working practices and technologies determined the kinds of accidents to which people were susceptible. Mowers cut fields of hay by walking in staggered lines so as to cut the whole crop without hitting one another with their scythes. But sometimes their concentration lapsed: that is how Richard Goodall got hit in the leg after 4 hours of mowing at Welford in Northamptonshire on July 1, 1559, dying 3 hours later. Carts and wagons were by far the most frequent pieces of machinery involved in accidents, followed by boats, but mills played their part too. Careless cleaning or greasing of the inner works of windmills and watermills might end with a victim pulled in and crushed among the cogs and wheels.

Travel also posed dangers. Men and women of almost all classes, including large numbers of labourers and servants, rode horses that might throw, kick, or trample them. Carts were easily overturned and could run over not just passing pedestrians, but any driver unfortunate enough to fall off or to trip while walking alongside. Journeys beside or across rivers, streams, and ponds posed the risk of drowning, thanks to faulty bridges, unpredictable fords, and slippery banks.

Other causes of death in Tudor England might be more surprising for us today. Hygiene accidents were mostly a matter of washing or relieving oneself into water deep enough to drown in. Many labourers drowned while washing after work in streams and ponds, most probably unaware of medical opinion at the time that it was better to change one's shirt than to expose the whole body to water and disease. Deaths that resulted from the pursuit of leisure activities are more varied. Archery practice was supposedly compulsory in the interests of national defence, but was clearly also enjoyed both by participants and by spectators; it was also the most dangerous sport by some distance. Football was blamed for distracting men from archery, but was also far from safe, as rough tackles and collisions, stony pitches, and the ill-advised habit of playing with a food knife tucked into one's belt took their share of victims. Wrestling, swimming, sword-fighting, and even bell-ringing and maypoles had their dangers. Like work, sports were seasonal. Football deaths nearly all came in February, while throwing the sledge-hammer, risky for careless spectators, took place in June and July.

Inquest reports described in some detail the injuries visible on the corpse of the deceased, giving the length, breadth, and depth of wounds in inches, or noting if there were no external injuries. Such details can be instructive. The mean depth of arrow wounds, for example, was an inch and a half, that of gunshot wounds six inches, not counting balls that went right through the body or head; no wonder armies gave up longbows for handguns, despite their slower rate of fire. Wounds also show us what could prove fatal under 16th-century conditions. Crushed heads, broken necks, trampled torsos, and cuts deep enough to sever arteries were clearly mortal wounds and generally caused instant death. But just as serious were injuries resulting from falls or collisions, presumably mostly internal, with which victims might languish for a week or two before dying. There are also reports of deaths occurring long after wounds to arms, legs, and sides, presumably as the victims succumbed to infection.

Although there is no evidence before the 1590s of the involvement of physicians in inquest post mortems, the verdicts reveal some degree of medical understanding. The importance of the brain and heart was familiar to coroners and their clerks. Reports describing head injuries that were instantly fatal often stressed that the skull was penetrated through to the brain—or in one case that “the pannicle that covered the brayne was wounded”. Mortal blows were described as striking the heart or piercing the body to the heart, while one leg wound caused by a falling stone led to “a swelling and tumour that spread to the body and the heart”. Drowning might be characterised in vivid terms. When Robert Kendall fell into the River Hatfield, “a rush of water entered his mouth and nose and stupefied his spirit”; when Hugh Jacke fell into the River Onny, “his spirit was stunned by the abundance of water flowing into his mouth and lungs”. Illnesses that affected the victim were also documented: the falling sickness, quartan fevers, agues, some of them causing insanity, all feature in these reports. Thomas Clerke fell off his gelding into the River Yare in Norfolk when he was “suddenly troubled by a certain infirmity called the Fallyng sukkenes”. In another instance, “the new dysease” is recorded, which left David Hakytt of Leicester too debilitated to leave home and forced him to empty his bowels in his garden, where he drowned in the spring.

Peasant and Birdnester (1568) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Copyright © 2012 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

Contemporaries, lastly, were well aware that it was possible to take steps to avoid injuries or to lessen their impact. Wells under construction were covered with planks and hurdles and some wounds would not have been fatal, jurors opined, had the victim had the care of a good surgeon. Experts on everyday tasks advised caution to avoid accidents, but this was not always easy to put into practice. The agricultural author Thomas Tusser counselled those aiming to destroy bird pests in trees “beware how ye climber, for breaking your neck”, but John Coole of Exton in Rutland stood on a weak branch on the way back down from destroying a kite's nest on June 12, 1560, and fell 20 feet to the ground. His death, like all those we are studying, is tragic, but these reports of accidental deaths are also wonderfully revealing of life, death, and health in Tudor England.

Our research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.