Analysis

Death by Words: Textual Geography of Suicides, Drownings and Killings in the Bills of Mortality

by Hernan Adasme
2024-09-26
analysis

Alongside quantitatively documenting plague outbreaks in Early Modern London, the Bills of Mortality also provide textual descriptions of causes of death. The Death by Numbers project is transcribing and making available to the public not only the plague numbers but also dozens of recorded causes of death found in the verso of the bills, which include accidents, killings, suicides, and drownings. This will eventually create a considerable –although not massive– corpus of textual data suitable for the application of several text analysis techniques, as a way to automate the extraction of information.

A Deadly Decade: Yearly Plague Spikes in Early Modern London between 1638-1647

by Hernan Adasme
2024-08-28
analysis

Following 1636’s outbreak, the plague cast a shadow over London’s life for almost ten years. Data collected from the Bills of Mortality by the Death By Numbers Project suggests that most summers witnessed a plague flare-up between 1638 and 1647. Though in the late 1630s these summer spikes were mild, the occurrence of the plague increased in intensity in the early 1640s up to 1647.1 Indeed, each summer during the 1640s, weekly deaths in London consistently reached into the hundreds, peaking at 250 in the years 1646 and 1647.

Who Counts? Religion, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Bills of Mortality

by Jessica Otis
2024-05-23
analysis

On Wednesday August 30, 1665, the diarist Samuel Pepys ran into his parish clerk and asked how the plague was progressing within their parish. To his dismay, the clerk “told me it encreases much, and much in our parish.” Worst of all, the clerk admitted that the plague was so bad that he had falsified his weekly reports of parish plague deaths: “for, says he, there died nine this week, though I have returned but six.

Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis

by Hernan Adasme
2023-12-04
analysis

Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis. During the seventeenth century, England experienced multiple plague outbreaks. Although milder than the 1603 and 1624 plague crisis, London’s outbreak of 1636 claimed the lives of roughly 10,400 individuals, approximately 7.5% of the population in London and its liberties.1 In this blog post, I delve into the first stages of the 1636 outbreak, by scrutinizing the propagation of the plague through London’s city subdivisions, with the aid of time-to-event analysis.

The London Bills of Mortality lend themselves to both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The following team member essays analyze the bills using a variety of historical and statistical methods.

Analysis Tags

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