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APPENDIX A
THE LONDON BILLS OF MORTALITY
Emergence of Bills
It is generally assumed that the Bills of Mortality for ' London ' began in 1593—thus
John Bell (1665), Clerk to the Company of Parish Clerks, says in his ' London Remembrancer
', ' I shall begin with the year 1593, being the first year in which any Account
of the Christenings and Burials was kept. I cannot find any Record of more antiquity
than that of this Year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall.' Evidence has since come
to light, however, which shows that as early as 1535 a bill was compiled by the Lord
Mayor for Thomas Cromwell in which it is stated than 152 persons had died in the
previous eight days.* There is also a manuscript of a weekly bill, a copy of which is
reproduced in Creighton (1891), p. 295, and Ogle (1892), which is thought to be dated
1532.
The foundation of regular record keeping in the field of vital statistics can also be
attributed to Thomas Cromwell who in 1538 issued an order by an injunction of
Henry VIII appointing the parson, vicar or curate of every parish in England and Wales
to keep a true and exact register of all weddings, christenings and burials. These records
were kept in Parish Registers and were not transmitted to any central office though as
early as 1590 Lord Burghley wished to set up a General Register Office (Glass, (1952)).
The earliest bills of mortality for London were compiled under the stimulus of
plague and contained, in addition to the total number of deaths, the numbers dying
of plague and also the number of christenings. Since most of the early bills were confined
to plague years an exaggerated picture of mortality in London in those times may be
obtained, but there is an interesting series of bills for the years 1578-82 in the library
of Hatfield House and these have been reproduced in Creighton (1891), p. 341, et seq
which give the numbers dying in a year in which there was no plague epidemic ;
e.g., in 1580 there were 2,873 deaths, including only 128 of the plague, and 3,568
christenings. Since according to Creighton every child was christened in church in the
time of Elizabeth I, it can be assumed that the births are fully recorded (with the doubtful
exception of stillborns and ' Chrisoms ').†
The bills were revived in 1592 and again in 1603—both plague years—and the first
of a continuous series of weekly bills of mortality, issued by the Company of Parish
Clerks, began on 29 December 1603, according to an anonymous work entitled ' A
Collection of the Yearly Bills of Mortality' (1759), generally attributed to Dr. Heberden.
The Bills continued to be issued by the Company, even after the Registrar General
adopted the practice of issuing a weekly return of deaths in London in 1840 ; to this
day this return is colloquially referred to as ' The Bill ' in the General Register Office.
Annex ' A ' shows the number of burials noted in the annual bills from 1578 to 1837
and, for comparison, for the years 1838-40 the number of deaths registered in London
from the annual reports of the Registrar General. During that period of 260 years
parishes were added as ' London ' spread (though not as many as should have been) ;
and as early as 1629 both a list of causes of death and the differentiation by sex was
introduced. (Details regarding the addition of parishes are given by Angus (1854) and
Ogle (1892).) The tradition is carried on in the present Table III of the Registrar
General's Weekly Return. Detailed causes of death have never been compiled continuously
weekly for any other city in England and Wales (and it was not until the
commencement of 1958 that the total weekly deaths for England and Wales were
published and even then only nine causes were itemised).
* In the Record Office. State papers, Henry VIII, No. 4633.
† 'A child that dies within a month after its birth. So called from the chrisom-cloth, a cloth anointed with holy unguent,
which the children anciently wore till they were christened'.
Johnson's Dictionary, ed. Todd, 1818.
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