Use Death By Number’s ‘Mapping Burials and Plague’ visualization to explore the spread of plague in the city of London. Look at parish level data for various years and compare how plague deaths versus other burials in each parish change over time. Ask students what they notice about the smaller parishes packed into the dense population center versus the outlying parishes.

Alongside quantitatively documenting plague outbreaks in Early Modern London, the Bills of Mortality also provide textual descriptions of causes of death. The Death by Numbers project is transcribing and making available to the public not only the plague numbers but also dozens of recorded causes of death found in the verso of the bills, which include accidents, killings, suicides, and drownings. This will eventually create a considerable –although not massive– corpus of textual data suitable for the application of several text analysis techniques, as a way to automate the extraction of information. For this blog post, I am using three datasets on causes of death compiled by the Death by Numbers transcription team. The first dataset covers the period from 1636 to 1649, the second from 1649 to 1659, and the third from 1659 to 1677. It’s important to note that while these datasets cover most years within these ranges, there are some gaps in the data.

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?

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. The monarchical bills enable us to study not just plague deaths by parish, but also every type of death that Londoners tracked in the bills of mortality.

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. The monarchical bills enable us to study not just plague deaths by parish, but also every type of death that Londoners tracked in the bills of mortality.

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.” ² While Pepys’ remark over the number of plague deaths was numerically incorrect (our records indicate the number of plague deaths was actually 6,978), Pepys was right to worry about the amount of death and the vice grip that plague held in London.³

In late November of 1703, a “great storm” or hurricane struck the British Isles. Bad weather began a few days before the heart of the storm made landfall on November 26th, spawning tornadoes, ripping off roofs and chimneys, and destroying entire fleets. One of the most famous tragedies of the storm happened on the Goodwin Sands, a deadly sandbank off the coast of Kent. At least 53 ships were wrecked on the sandbank and over 2,000 men died just six miles from safety.

The team is excited to announce that shapefiles for 17th and 18th century London are now available on our GitHub: https://github.com/chnm/bom/tree/main/parish-shapefiles

The Bill of Mortality from Christmas week in 1664 reports that three people died in the parish of St Foster. But fifty years later, there were happily no Christmas deaths in the parish of St Vedast—or rather, the parish of “St Vedast alias Foster.” Because the parish of St Vedast is the parish of St Foster. Welcome to the complex world of early modern parish names.

Given that our sources were published over the course of centuries, it’s hardly surprising that the names of some of the parishes in the bills changed over time. It does, however, present a bit of a challenge for our project since transcribers must be able to match the names in the bills to the names on the transcription form. And even if we were to change the names on the transcription form to accommodate changing parish names, analyzing bills of mortality over time still requires us to know whether a parish listed on a bill in 1582 is the same as a parish listed in a bill in 1752. Our solution has been to create a master list of the parish names, which includes the parish names we use on the transcription forms along with variant names that transcribers might encounter over time. These variant names are then included both in the transcription form and the detailed guidelines for our transcribers.

One of the more helpful digital databases for the study of early modern history is Early English Books Online (EEBO), which contains images of most of the surviving books printed in England between 1473 and 1700. It builds upon the cataloging work of 19th-century bibliographers and began its life as a collection of microfilm in the late 1930s and 1940s before being digitized at the turn of the twenty-first century.¹ Because its focus is on books rather than broadsides or bills, EEBO only contains a small fraction of the early modern Bills of Mortality but a keyword search for the bills still turns up almost 500 results. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are largely publications that mention the bills rather than the bills themselves. However, it is interesting that these publications are not discussing the bills as a source of quantitative data on mortality. Instead, they are using the bills as a synonym for a place: the city of London and its suburbs.

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.