The London Bills of Mortality were complex documents whose format changed significantly over the hundreds of years they were produced by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. These essays by project team members help explain and situate the bills in their historical context.

General Introduction

• London Bills of Mortality
• Confusion of Calendars
• Why is There Bread in the Bills?

Space and Places

• Parishes and Extra-Parochial Places
• “Within the Bills”: EEBO and the Early Modern London Metropolis
• A Parish By Any Other Name

Production of the Bills

• A Woman’s Touch on the Bills of Mortality
• The Parish Clerks’ Memento Mori: Iconography of Death and Trademark in the London Bills of Mortality, 1727-1752

Reading the Bills

• God’s Terrible Voice in the City: New England Connections to the London Bills of Mortality
• London in Tears: Grief and Collective Mourning in the Bills of Mortality
• The Facts of Mortality: the Use of the London Bills in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

Specific Causes of Death

• A Starvation Death During the Great Plague of 1665
• Chimneys and the Great Storm of 1703
• Found Dead? Unknown Causes of Death in the Bills of Mortality
• Infant Mortality in the Monarchical Bills of Mortality, 1665-1669
• Of Fires Great and Small
• Old Age and Aged Deaths
• Strangled himself (being distracted): Messy Data and Suicides in the Bills of Mortality