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Go directly to the MoEML Finding Aid for the Bills of Mortality.
The bills of mortality in early modern London were both printed documents that provided the statistics on deaths in the parishes of London and popular texts to talk upon
, according to John Graunt in his
value of [the bills](Plomer 222). This tendency to read the bills statistically—while having led to the preservation of the bills’ demographic data—has effaced the bibliographic codes of the texts. Consequentially, our understanding of the material form and print conventions of the bills remains incomplete. By compiling an exhaustive, enumerative bibliography of all extant early modern bills of mortality and their digital surrogates, I hope to remedy the nineteenth-century criticism and facilitate a turn in the critical conversation surrounding the London bills of mortality.is very small
There have been few attempts at enumerating and collecting the bills of mortality into a single document. Arguably, the first finding aid was F.P. Wilson’s appendix to the second edition of could find very few
(Wilson xi). He continues, writing what amounts to a short prose finding aid. The scope of Wilson’s appendix differs from the MoEML finding aid in a number of ways: first, Wilson’s is an in-prose description of the bills, with footnotes leading to his sources; second, he does not discriminate between the physical bill and the statistics harvested from the bills; and third, he does not provide an enumerated list. Paul Slack provides a similar overview of the bills in
This enumerative, exhaustive bibliography lists the bills of mortality that meet the following criteria:
Small summative documents (often referred to as plague bills) are not included, except for a few early manuscript records that provide documentation about the tradition of gathering statistics. I exclude texts that quote mortality numbers or publish them as paratext on printed broadside prayers and ballads. Facsimiles and scholarly transcriptions are not included unless they contain the only known reference to a particular bill, in which case I provide a citation in the note column.
The bills in this bibliography are sorted by year and defined by the following parameters:
The data was first drawn from EEBO, Wilson, Sutherland, the ESTC, and the
Each sheet of the spreadsheet was then collapsed and converted into a single text value with doubled quoted, tab-delimited fields. An XSLT (2.0) processed each row of the text file, assigning each cell a variable name and forming the desired TEI rows. The TEI rows were compressed into tables and sorted, grouped, and divided into annual sections, with yearly and weekly bills differentiated into various tables.
ESTC and TCP numbers were added programatically through another XSLT transformation. I converted the JSON catalogue of TCP numbers (available via the TCP Github here) into an XML representation using XSLT 3.0. The result XML was then processed against the STC numbers recorded in the Finding Aid; if there was a cross-reference to the TCP or ESTC, then those identifying numbers and catalogue entries (if applicable) were added to the Finding Aid. If the TCP version of the text was available, then a link to the TCP surrogate was added to the table.
This exhaustive bibliography of mortality bills will help researchers of literature, history, and culture contextualize their research within the early modern environment of the plague. The table is sortable, which helps those investigating the plague in early modern London and its various effects find particular years of interest. For example, demographic researchers can investigate the mortality rates in particular years, cross-reference Graunt’s and other demographers’s texts with their source material, and trace the history of human statistics in early modern London.
The end result of this bibliography is not to provide answers but to provoke questions. Since early criticism hinged on discrediting the accuracy of the bills, few research questions have been asked about what the bills tell us about early modern London. Some questions that arise from this bibliography include: