Reckoning with London: interpreting the Bills of Mortality before John Graunt

Abstract

Early modern Londoners had access to weekly reports on the numbers of deaths. These weekly ‘books of death’ that the Parish Clerks' Company compiled provided the base for a city-wide system whereby the number of deaths in every parish was reported to the Lord Mayor and the monarch. Under James and Charles royal interest led to the extension of the parishes listed in the Bills of Mortality to cover the wider metropolis while readers developed strategies for interpreting these weekly figures. In 1662 statistics derived from the annual summaries of the London Bills provided the base for John Graunt's path-breaking actuarial calculations. However, despite Graunt's demonstration of the importance of supplementary data that the Bills had incorporated, a system geared to report the weekly ebb and flow of epidemics was unable to provide the statistics that statisticians wanted. Rather than blaming the Bills, disappointed scholars claimed that the female parish searchers were incompetent.