“I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.” -Dracula
You have to hand it to the count, that’s a very compressive view of the city of London. In order to fully understand any large population you have to take into account everything that happens within it. And the way its people die has a lot to teach. Of course Dracula had plans to add to London’s death. But if he had just wanted to casually read up on who was dying, how often, and how they met their end, then he picked the right city. For three hundred years the deaths of Londoners were meticulously recorded and made available in a weekly publication known as ‘The Bill of Mortality.”
The London Bill of Mortality (cover pictured below) was first published in 1532. It is noteworthy for having been one the world’s earliest, attempts to systematically collect and track data on death and its’ causes. Each week the bill listed all the recorded deaths within the city of London. It included the names of the deceased, the causes of their deaths (if known), places of burial, and the parish in which each burial took place. This was no small undertaking (pardon the pun.) Death was a commonplace event for the people of London in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the death rate often exceeded the birth rate.
The first step in keeping track of so many dead was to actually find them. The unenviable task of searching them out was performed by official ‘searchers.’ It was literally the job of searchers to seek out stray corpses. Most searchers were elderly women who performed this unpleasant task because they had little or nothing else in the way of a stable source of income. They combed the streets, back alleys, abandoned buildings, the Thames river and other out of the way places where a corpse might end up. As the searchers were typically the first to view a discovered body they were also the ones to decide what the cause of death had been; even though they rarely had any formal medical training. A doctor would only be consulted on the more difficult cases. Despite their lack of medical expertise, the searcher’s opinion as to the cause of death carried great deal of influence on what would be done with the body. This was particularly so with those deaths attributed to the bubonic plague, as these bodies could only be buried in certain designated locations.
The searchers reported their findings to their local parish clerk who prepared a comprehensive account of all the deaths in his parish. The parish reports then formed the basis for each weekly bill of death which was published and distributed on Thursday of each week. The Bill of Mortality was available by subscription to anyone who wanted it for an annual fee of four shillings. Why would the average Londoner shell out money for a journal that reports on nothing but death? For a very good reason indeed. For most of its history London has been one of the world’s most heavily populated cities. And high populations are a haven for disease. But this was never more true than in 1665 when the bubonic plague struck London. The numbers of people entering London from the rural country side, along with the squalid conditions in which they lived, made London no stranger to plagues. But the London plague of 1665 was one of the worst in terms of the numbers of victims. It was, in fact, one of the last major outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Europe. And given that without treatment, the bubonic plague kills about two thirds of infected humans within 4 days, London citizens quite rightly fearful for their lives every day.
To give some idea of the scope of the plague’s impact on London, the Bill of Mortality listed the total number of plague related deaths in the city for 1665 as being 68,596. Knowing how quickly the disease was spreading, and which portions of the city were most affected was crucially important. The London Bill of Mortality was the most reliable source of information on these facts. As such, it was a highly influential publication. The statistics presented in the bill dictated much of the movement of the London population within and outside the city. When the death toll rose in a given area, people would move out quickly. When it decreased they would return. The right of ordinary citizens to travel at all could be dictated by the bill. If the numbers of infected in a parish went particularly high it might be quarantined all together.
The plague ended in 1666, about a year after it began. However the Bill of Mortality continued to be published and widely read. It remained in print for a grand total of three hundred and four years. For those three centuries the Bill of Mortality recorded a wealth of information that is of great historical value. After all, it was not only plague related deaths that were listed in the bill. Every known death and its cause were put down for posterity. And, as stated earlier, how people die says a great deal about how they lived. For example, a glimpse into how the poor often had to obtain food can be seen in a bill entry dated to 1731:
‘Two men digging under a laystall at Mountmill near Islington, a great quantity of earth fell upon them, whereby one was killed the other much hurt.’
A ‘laystall’ originally referred to a holding place for cattle that were to be sold at market. Understandably, a laystall tended to accumulate a lot of manure. The term was later used to mean a place where dung and other waste swept from London’s streets and cesspits, were piled up to be later disposed of. Basically it was a big pile of poop and garbage. Such large piles could be several tens of feet high and often served as directional landmarks for the city. These dunghills were frequently scavenged by the poor who hoped to find food, fuel or other usable materials. This practice was clearly not without its hazards. On this occasion, the diggers came upon an unstable part of the mound and sank into the waste where they were buried alive. This was not uncommon.
The bill published in the first week of March in 1728 shows an odd spike in the fatalities relating to falls from high windows. This was part of a trend that seemed to occur frequently during early months of the year throughout the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Exactly why people seemed to be so clumsy in tall buildings early in the year is open to speculation. It could be that warmer weather in March had people opening more windows. Or it might have to do with the beginning of the building season. Perhaps the warmer weather simply made people friskier! If so these deaths could have been the result of amorous gentlemen escaping angry husbands by climbing out of windows. Watch out Romeo, that first step is a doozey!
The compilers and publishers of The Bill of Mortality were not above using the influence of the publication to promote their own sense of morality. A 1672 issue of the bill list:
“A women burnt being drunk in St Paul Shadwell.”
This most likely means that the woman in question fell into a fire while drunk. Noting that alcohol was a contributing factor was not strictly necessary and is clearly a kind of thinly veiled lesson about the evils of intemperance. But it was not just the consumers of alcohol that found them-selves listed in the bill. A 1728 issue listed:
“1 scalded in a distillers copper, a young man, at St James Clerkenwell.”
In all likelihood the young man scalded to death was the servant or apprentice of a gin distiller. So manufacturing spirits was also not without its dangers. Of course there were suicides too. In February of 1731 an issue of the bill mentioned:
“1 cut his own throat being a lunatick at St Giles without Cripplegate.”
No more is mentioned about this incident that might put it into context. It is not clear if the individual was a mental patient or if he was believed to have been crazy simply because he killed himself. Sometimes the absence of context makes the listings almost incomprehensible. A 1721 edition listed a man who…
“hanged himself being distracted at St Andrew Holborn.”
Huh?! Hanged him-self being distracted? The imagination is left on its own here to come up with any number of bizarre scenarios where in the unfortunate gentleman could have hanged himself just by being momentarily distracted!
The Bill of Mortality finally went out of print in 1836 when it was replaced by the ‘Registrar General’s returns’ which was established under the Births and Death Registrations Act. The fictitious Count Dracula would have arrived in London about fifty years too late to get a subscription to the Bill of Mortality. But he would have had three hundred years worth of back issue to study. I hope this helped to darken your day. Morbid Monday to ya!
Rocas Dorrran
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