All Posts and Essays

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

by Hernan Adasme

2024-09-26

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.

Ambiguous Bills and Anonymous Commentators: Reflections on My Experience Transcribing the Bills of Mortality

by Laszlo Taba

2024-09-10

workflows

I have had the pleasure over the last several months of transcribing Bills of Mortality for the Death by Numbers team, and what initially most surprised me is the amount of interpretation my role requires. Just because the bills are what historians would describe as “primary sources,” transcribing them is more complicated than just copying them word-for-word. While it helps that the original bills are in English, I still routinely run into textual issues that require me to pause and think carefully and critically about how to approach the text.

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.

A Woman's Touch on the Bills of Mortality

by Luz Adriana Giraldo Mueller

2024-06-10

context

It is difficult to analyze the role of women in the creation of the Bills of Mortality due to the lack of information in the historical record, especially contextual information on women’s everyday experiences. Previous scholars have studied how women fulfilled roles caring for and nursing the sick or how the death of their husbands and family members affected their livelihood, ultimately rendering them destitute. Others have focused on the searchers who collected data on the deceased and passed it on to the Parishes’ clerks for tallying before it was given to the printers for publication.

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.

Early Modern Death in the 21st Century Classroom

by Jessica Otis, Katie Kania

2024-05-11

context

A poster on Early Modern Death in the 21st Century Classroom presented at AAHM.

How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data?

by Cecilia Ward

2024-03-13

workflows

Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting original research and maps about early modern death at the 2024 American Historical Association in San Francisco. I showcased maps between 1656 and 1680 based on general bill data. That span of years offered interesting data to showcase, including the major plague outbreak in London in 1665 and the Great Fire of London a year later in 1666. But how did I actually map these years?

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.

Comparing the Bills of Mortality and Old Bailey Proceedings

by Savannah Scott

2023-11-27

analysis

The Bills of Mortality were weekly reports that recorded the number of deaths in London, beginning in 1603 and continuing consistently until 1819. These bills reported the number of burials and plague deaths in each London and surrounding parish. They also reported the different causes of death, male/female christenings, and male/female burials for the entire city. The causes of death included illnesses and ailments, as well as accidents and killings. Two causes of death—execution and murder—have the possibility of being cross-referenced with other early modern documents, particularly court records.

Death by Numbers: the Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669

by Katie Kania, Jessica Otis

2023-11-07

analysis

During the early modern period, the city of London produced weekly mortality reports called bills of mortality. These bills—printed from 1603 onward—detail the number of deaths per parish; plague deaths per parish; and deaths citywide by cause of death. However printed bills were actually summaries of manuscript bills produced for the monarch, which contain a parish-by-parish breakdown of every cause of death throughout the city of London for the preceding week.

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

Ambiguous Bills and Anonymous Commentators: Reflections on My Experience Transcribing the Bills of Mortality

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

A Woman's Touch on the Bills of Mortality

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

Early Modern Death in the 21st Century Classroom

How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data?

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

Comparing the Bills of Mortality and Old Bailey Proceedings

Death by Numbers: the Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669

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