Geographical Patterns of Death in the Early Modern London Bills of Mortality

At the turn of the seventeenth century, London officials started publicly distributing a weekly series of mortality statistics called the Bills of Mortality. The city’s population rapidly embraced the bills as a tool for evaluating their risk of imminent death, which led to the bills' continuous weekly publication starting in 1603. These public bills eventually came to contain all-inclusive death counts and numbers for dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their ongoing publication and widespread distribution for over a century and a half after the final outbreak of plague in England. While theoretically covering the entire population of London, the bills’ data was collected through the existing parish infrastructure of the Church of England, which excluded an increasing percentage of the population in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the church lost its religious monopoly. This led to their eventual discontinuation as they were superseded by civil registries in the nineteenth century.

The London Bills of Mortality thus form an invaluable–albeit imperfect–source of demographic data about the population of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. This poster will assess the bills as a source of demographic data before using them to examine mortality patterns over time and space in early modern London. The city of London was a demographic sink during this time period, with consistently more deaths than births, but some parts of the city were deadlier than others. Using statistical analysis and GIS, this poster will investigate the changing birth and death rates of early modern Londoners from 1636 through 1752 and visualize how these deaths were distributed across the parochial landscape of the city and its suburbs. It will also analyze the geographical distribution of deaths within the contexts of population density and wealth, including how both the absolute and proportional death rates of parishes varied over time.