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Parishes and Extra-Parochial Places

by Jessica Otis
2022-02-28
context

The main organizational unit behind the London Bills of Mortality is the parish: a religious administrative unit usually consisting of one or more churches, their associated staff, and all Christians living within the geographical bounds of the parish. The parish clergy christened, married, and buried their parishioners and—starting in the sixteenth century—the parish clerk kept a register of those events. The burial numbers would eventually form the basis of the bills, with christenings added later.

Confusion of Calendars

by Emily Meyers, Jessica Otis
2022-02-14
context

One of the first things a Bill of Mortality tells the reader is the date. The bill (partially) pictured below covers mortality data for the city of London, in the 3rd week of the current bills’ year, which ran from the 31st of December to the 7th of January in the year 1700 AD (from the Latin, Anno Domini, which was often translated into English as the Year of the Lord).

The London Bills of Mortality

by Dan Howlett, Jessica Otis
2022-01-31
context

Plague epidemics were a recurring threat in late medieval and early modern Europe. While plague could and did strike anywhere, the most well-documented epidemics were often in cities. Responses varied across time and space, as city leaders and other political authorities attempted to avoid contagion, contain the sick, and understand the scope of the threat plague currently posed to their lives and their livelihoods. These responses included the creation of lists: lists of people sick with plague, lists of cities infected with plague, and–starting in the sixteenth century–lists of the number of people who had died of plague.

DbN Team Wins Grant from National Science Foundation

by Jessica Otis
2021-08-31
announcements

The Death by Numbers team is excited to announce that we have won a grant from the NSF, officially titled Digitization and Analysis of the Bills of Mortality Data Set. This grant runs from 2021 to 2024 and the grant abstract is reproduced below: One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England was plague. The city of London alone lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague in the century between 1563 and 1665.

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