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Infant Mortality In The Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669

by Katie Kania, Jessica Otis
2023-10-25
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.

London, 1665: Living in a Deathtrap

by Cecilia Ward
2023-08-24
analysis

Samuel Pepys is primarily remembered for his decade-long diary, which recorded major events in 17th century English history including the Great Plague Outbreak (1665).1 Just before the height of the plague, on September 7, 1665, Pepys wrote in his diary, “[I] sent for the Weekely Bill, and find 8,252 dead in all, and of them 6,878 of the plague; which is a most dreadfull number, and shows reason to fear the plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us.

A Starvation Death During the Great Plague of 1665

by Mary Shuman
2023-05-08
analysis

Figure 1. A photograph of the bill of mortality for the week of November 14-21, 1665. On the Bill of Mortality for the week of November 14-21st, 1665, plague deaths were finally decreasing from a horrific summer. The total number of plague deaths was still a staggering six hundred and fifty-two, but that did not stop parish officials from recording all the other ways that Londoners were dying. One death stood out as an intriguing mystery: starved in White Lyon prison at St George in Southwark.

What happens when 'Is Missing' becomes more literal?

by Emily Meyers, Cecilia Ward
2023-04-10
workflows

As Death by Numbers has evolved and developed, there have been some slight changes to our workflow, which caused us to reconsider how to work through and present our data. One of those shifts came about because we set up our workflows using early 18th century bills as a model, before shifting to work with the bills from the mid and late 17th century. As a team, we quickly realized that the older bills were falling apart and had more missing information than the bills produced later.

Recent Posts

How Can You Map with Bills of Mortality Data? Cecilia Ward · 2024-03-13
Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis Hernan Adasme · 2023-12-04
Comparing the Bills of Mortality and Old Bailey Proceedings Savannah Scott · 2023-11-27
Death by Numbers: the Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669 Katie Kania Jessica Otis · 2023-11-07
Infant Mortality In The Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669 Katie Kania Jessica Otis · 2023-10-25

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