London Bills of Mortality (symposium)

A Spring 2018 Symposium

Organized by Vanessa Harding and Kristin Heitman

In the mid-1550s, London’s Court of Aldermen directed the Company of Parish Clerks to compile weekly reports of the number of burials in each City parish that included a cause for each death. These became the famous Bills of Mortality, a significant feature of London life for three centuries, evolving in form and content with the metropolis they recorded. The Bills illuminate aspects of early-modern London’s governance, print culture, and appetite for news. The process of compilation, including reliance on parish “searchers” to determine causes of death, provides clues to social conditions, gender roles, and the interests of the City’s governors. The data reported contribute to understanding the City’s shifting demography and social topography; perceptions of diagnosis, disease, and death; the history of plague; and contemporary interest in quanti­tative knowledge. The symposium aims to bring together scholars working on these topics to examine the early modern Bills in detail—including the Folger’s unique manuscript report from 1591—and to explore their context and significance.

Organizers: Vanessa Harding, Professor of London History at Birkbeck, University of London, has written about death and burial in London and about the sources on which estimates of London’s population are based. Forthcoming work on London plague examines annotated copies of the Bills of Mortality and composite or commemorative plague bills. Kristin Heitman is an independent scholar based in Bethesda, Maryland, whose interests center on metrics and systems of records. Her current work concerns the origins of the Bills of Mortality and the life of John Graunt.

Schedule: Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday, 19 – 21 April 2018.

Apply: 8 January 2018 for admission and grants-in-aid.

Provisional Program

Thursday, 18 April

4.30-5.00 pm

Welcome: Owen Williams (Folger)

Introduction: Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck College, University of London)

5.00-6.30 The Curious and Useful London Bills of Mortality: What do they report?

Chair: Vanessa Harding

Hal Cook (Brown University)

Andrea Rusnock (University of Rhode Island)

The London Bills of Mortality figure prominently in histories of plague and public health, disease patterns and demography, political arithmetic, quantification, and statistics, seeming to count all kinds of people according to a single criterion: we are all equal in the face of death. Since the seventeenth century, writers have collected, analyzed, and republished these curious documents to answer a spectacular array of questions including the sex ratio at birth, the rise and fall of smallpox, and the role of women in determining cause of death. This session will explore the enduring attraction and creative analyses of one of the most fascinating and fecund historical sources.

6.30-7.30 Reception

Friday, 19 April

9.30-11.00 am Origins & infrastructure

Chair: Keith Wrightson (Yale University)

Ian Archer (Oxford University)

Kristin Heitman (Independent scholar)

This session will explore the origins and early development of the London Bills of Mortality. It will begin by examining two documents: (1) the text of a 1555 London ordinance recognizing the Company of Parish Clerks for compiling weekly reports on parish mortalities from not just plague but a full range of causes of death; and (2) a 1591 manuscript report, in the Folger's collection, that may indicate how the weekly counts were initially presented. We will also consider the changing status of parish clerks and their roles as cultural brokers and sources of local information in the Reformation decades; possible reasons for establishing the data-collection program; likely access to the reports in the period before the data were published; and the purposes the reports may have served in governing the city.

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-1.00 Searchers & the parish

Richelle Munkhoff (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Wanda Henry (Brown University)

Acting as public officers for the parish from at least 1592 through the 19th century, women searchers examined dead bodies to determine cause of death for London’s Bills of Mortality. During this session, participants will consider individual searchers of the dead as well as patterns in the parish appointments over the longue durée. The presenters will encourage conversation about the evolution of public health, social history of death, and gender dynamics at the parish level and beyond.

1.00-2.30 Lunch

2.30-4.00 Quantitative Thought

Chair: Andrea Rusnock (University of Rhode Island)

Paul Slack (Oxford University)

Philip Kreager (Oxford University)

This session will explore the nature of quantitative thought, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will first consider some important innovations in quantitative thinking between 1500 and 1650, notably the concept and calculation of the ‘balance of trade’, then turn to early attempts to use the Bills to calculate sizes and trends in population. The use of proportion across the same period will provide a critical bridge to examining what relationships people began to count as well as how and why they counted; the role of tabulation in presenting numerical data; and the various ways in which later governments set out to compile, or sometimes create, data for quantitative thinking.

4.00-4.30 Tea

4.30-6.00 London’s world of print

Chair: Stephen Greenberg (National Library of Medicine)

Joseph Monteyne (University of British Columbia)

Christopher Kyle (Syracuse University)

This session will explore the textual, visual culture of print in early modern London, in which the weekly Bills were one among many ephemeral printed forms vying for notice. Modern readers of the Bills may view them in isolation, but the early modern city was littered with print and paper. Competition for attention encouraged the development of distinctive formats and consistent styles for particular kinds of publication, as with the Bills themselves. Plague regulations and proclamations used layout and language to assert authority and priority, but printers also responded by developing new and eye-catching formats for presenting information, such as the composite plague bills of the seventeenth century, combining text and image, historical fact and current news. We aim to reflect on the plethora of print in early modern London, and on the strategies and technologies that printers and publishers used to secure attention and acceptance.

 

Saturday, 20 April

9.30-11.00 Users and Consumers of the Bills of Mortality

Chair: Paul Slack (Oxford University)

Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck, University of London)

Mark Jenner (University of York)

This session will consider the evidence for contemporary consumption of the Bills of Mortality. Though many thousands were printed, only a handful now survive, but some of these give clues to ownership and reading practices. John Graunt suggested that readers first checked the mortality figures, and also drew on reports of ‘rare, and extraordinary’ casualties to provide a topic for conversation in company; letters and diaries bear this out. But the currency and wide circulation of the Bills meant they could be used to advertise and disseminate other official information, such as the weekly Assize of Bread. We will explore what can be known or deduced about the Bills’ readers and the informational uses to which the Bills were put.

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-1.00 John Graunt and William Petty

Chair: Kristin Heitman

Margaret Pelling (Oxford University)

Ted McCormick (Concordia University)

This session will begin by considering John Graunt's likely understanding of the Bills, their origins, and uses. It will then turn to William Petty's response to Graunt's proposals in the context of other contemporary thought about populations, governance, and the potential for social transformation. Joint discussion will also consider how others subsequently understood those proposals as shifting sociopolitical contexts altered and even obscured some of the original assumptions.

1.00-2.30 Lunch

2.30-4.00 Disease, environment, and the uses of the Bills of Mortality

Chair: Hal Cook

Rebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University)

Kevin Siena (Trent University)

As the last full session of the symposium, we aim to open up discussion of the legacy of the Bills in the longer term. We will explore how the Bills influenced thinking about health and mortality from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, not least by creating a common vocabulary of ‘diseases and casualties’ and furthering the idea of discrete disease entities. With their emphasis on the localisation of mortality, they helped forge powerful connections between notions of class, space, disease and risk within cities. But they also lent themselves to other uses and appropriations, literary as well as political. Finally, we suggest their relevance to contemporary issues such as how we understand and respond to natural disasters and trauma.

4.00-4.30 Break

4.30-6.00 Wrap-up and general discussion

Chairs: Vanessa Harding & Kristin Heitman

6.00-7.00 Closing reception