All Content

One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England was plague, which was present in the British Isles from 1348 until 1679. The most well-documented epidemics of the early modern era were in England’s cities, particularly London, which suffered six major epidemics in the century between 1563 and 1665, and lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague. Government officials attempted to quantify the severity of various plague outbreaks and, starting in 1603, published London’s weekly mortality statistics in broadside series known as the Bills of Mortality.

Overview The Bills of Mortality API is organized around REST and returns JSON-encoded responses from our PostgreSQL database using standard HTTP response codes and verbs. The data held by Death by Numbers are available in machine readable formats (currently JSON and CSV) to aid in research and data visualization. The first API was released in 2021, and the second version in 2024. The 2024 version provides new functionality for searching, sorting, and filtering; provides additional endpoints for data; and a set of new documentation for a quick start in exploring the data.

Angus, John, “Old and New Bills of Mortality; Movement of the Population; Deaths and Fatal Diseases in London During the Last Fourteen Years,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 17.2 (1854), 117-42. Boulton, Jeremy and Leonard Schwarz, “Yet another inquiry into the trustworthiness of eighteen-century London’s Bills of Mortality,” Local Population Studies 85 (2010): 28-45. Bos, Kirsten I. et al, “A Draft Genome of Yersinia pestis from Victims of the Black Death,” Nature 478, no.

Context page.

The data for the Death by Numbers project has been manually transcribed out of photographs and digitized microfiche images of the original bills of mortality. To ensure that scholars are able to trace our transcriptions back to the original, archival sources, we have divided our transcribed bills into multiple datasets that are named and described according to the archive and call numbers where we found collections of bills. This is most apparent in the downloadable CSV files and can also be traced in the unique IDs for each transcription.

We provide multiple ways to use and interact with the data generated through this project. The data can either be downloaded as a comma-separated value document (.csv) or accessed through the data API. The raw data exports are available on our Github repository. The README in the repostitory describes the contents of the datasets. These datasets are arranged as wide tables and are direct exports from DataScribe. You may also consult the data API’s documentation if you’d like to use the data directly.

Cause Definition Abortive aborted pregnancy; see also miscarriage and still-born Aged death by natural causes of old age Ague chills and fever; often from malaria Apoplexy rupture of an internal organ, especially the brain Asthma chronic inflamation of the airways, making it difficult to breathe Beaten Bed-ridden confined to bed through sickness or infirmity Blasted Bleeding Bloody-flux bloody diarrhea, esp. from dysentery Burnt Calenture probably heat stroke or sunstroke Cancer per OED: Originally: any of various types of non-healing sore or ulcer (cf.

The following table is our authority file of parish names. Canonical Name Subunit Foundation Year Notes St Alban Wood Street 97 parishes within the walls medieval, rebuilt 1634, destroyed 1666, rebuilt All Hallows Barking 97 parishes within the walls All Hallows Bread Street 97 parishes within the walls destroyed 1666, rebuilt All Hallows the Great 97 parishes within the walls destroyed 1666, rebuilt All Hallows Honey Lane 97 parishes within the walls destroyed 1666, parish united with St.