Abstract
The right to possession of the body of the deceased - an established common law right that places one particular individual in physical and decision-making control over a particular deceased body - is only partially understood by modern courts. This article aims to improve our understanding of the modern right to possession by undertaking a detailed examination of its history.
It argues that the right to possession recognisable in the modern case law, alongside a duty to bury the body and a financial responsibility to fund that disposal, is one of three structural 'strands' that make up an external legal architecture of bodily disposal. This article's analysis of this external architecture from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards reveals that its three structural strands were developed, and consistently vested in some one identifiable person, by English courts as a means of responding to two ever-present normative concerns: public health and public decency.