ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Myriad Forms and Sums of the London Bills of Mortals

• In Event: Disciplinary Perspectives on the London Bills of Mortality, 1518–1858

English Abstract

In 1518, King Henry VIII had a problem: plague was ravaging England and he didn’t know how bad the disease had become in the cities, towns, and villages around his various royal palaces. He ordered his men to find out, beginning over three centuries of data collection, dissemination, and analysis in the city of London. The earliest surviving evidence of these efforts consists of summary statistics conveyed in letters, followed by manuscript certificates that consisted of unordered lists of corpses. Over the course of the sixteenth century, these bills of mortality grew more sophisticated, gradually transforming into tidy, alphabetized lists of London parishes with their dead enumerated by cause of death, with subtotal and total counts. Although manuscript bills continued to be produced in these formats during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were supplemented by a simplified, printed form, focused once again on plague deaths, that was produced for public consumption. The printed bills became the avenue by which ordinary Londoners gained access to public health data that they could interpret, analyze, and use as the basis for predicting the future course of epidemics. Indeed, in the scholarly literature on this period, the printed bills eclipsed the primary, manuscript reports. This talk will examine the myriad forms and changing nature of the London bills of mortality over the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on how the quantitative data in the bills was totalled and subtotalled, categorized and transformed, and abstracted and summarized for both governmental and public consumption.

Author

• Jessica Otis, George Mason University