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The London Bills of Mortality

For a century and a half, London counted its dead week by week. We are transcribing those broadsides into a dataset built for computation — and asking what it meant to know a city by its numbers.

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A printed London Bill of Mortality showing weekly death counts by parish

Welcome to the Bills of Mortality

Between 1603 and 1752, almost 8,000 different weekly bills were published. Death by Numbers aims to transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.

Explore the data: This is an ongoing project: the datasets are not complete.

Read all about it: Check out our combined post page or go to the individual overviews for historical context, project analyses, and an inside look at our workflows.

Latest Writings

· analysis

Kild by the Blast of Gunpowder

· analysis

Analyzing the Arithmetic

· teaching

Urban Plague with Death By Numbers Lesson Plan

The Plague Database

Browse over a million transcribed records — by parish, by cause of death, by week — across the full run of the bills.

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A 1642 London Bill of Mortality from the Bodleian Library

Visualizing the Plague

Transcription opens new approaches for visualization — calendars of causes, parish heat maps, and weekly sparklines that reveal the shape of an epidemic.

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Preview of a data visualization showing mortality patterns

Analyzing the Plague

Read our ongoing research into the London plague bills.

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A researcher examining historical plague bills