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How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data?

by Cecilia Ward
2024-03-13

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

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

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

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.