Bills Of Mortality Research Articles

H11 More cancer, better counting or better at diagnosis? The history of skin cancer registration

Abstract Cancer registries help us to understand skin cancer cause, prevalence, treatment and prevention. They provide evidence to gain new healthcare resources. This paper studies the evolution of cancer registries and their relevance to dermatology. In the 16th century, ‘Bills of Mortality’, the first English healthcare registry, catalogued the number and causes of death in London parishes. Originally set up to track bubonic plague, it expanded to cover other diseases, including cancer. The 1728 London ‘General Census of Cancer’ was an early systemic study of cancer. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, hospital censuses often monitored cancers. These were superseded by population-based cancer registries, allowing continuous data collection. An early example is the Hamburg Cancer Registry (1926), which recorded names on a card-based registry and compared them with death certificates. The first national cancer registry was the Danish national cancer registry, formed in 1942. In the UK, the Scottish Cancer Registry was formed in 1958, the Welsh Cancer Intelligence & Surveillance Unit in 1972 and the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry in 1994. In England, eight regional registries were created, with the South West being the first in 1945. The Calman–Hine report (1995) highlighted a desire for a national cancer registry. In 2008, the National Cancer Intelligence Network enabled the assimilation and analysis of data sets from English registries. They merged in 2013, forming the National Cancer Registry and Analysis Service (NCRAS), England. Critically, the 2006 National Health Service act (section 251) allowed cancer data collection without formal consent. Although melanoma data were generally good quality, the inclusion and quality of nonmelanoma skin cancers (NMSCs) were historically less reliable, with improvement since 2013. Historically, the exclusion of NMSCs from published cancer data is common. Wales is the last UK registry to not routinely report NMSC. However, this is due to change in 2024. The ‘global burden of disease tool’ (1990) utilizes various sources, including cancer registry data, to model incidence, mortality and health implications of disease globally, including melanoma and NMSCs. In 2022, the British Association of Dermatologists joined with the NCRAS to develop the Get Data Out skin tool, an annually updated website featuring more granular epidemiological data on skin cancers. High-quality epidemiological data are essential to understanding skin cancer’s regional and chronological variations, and to ensure that resources for healthcare and research are allocated appropriately.

The Forensic Tradition in Milan’s Civic Mortality Registers

From the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century, many Italian cities and towns responded to recurrent plague by keeping municipal death registers. Different in content and character from the most celebrated form of early modern mortality records, the London Bills of Mortality, Italian authorities named, rather than counted, persons who died. This municipal practice illustrates the invention of secular death investigation systems in an era of recurring plague. Milan’s uniquely detailed civic death registers, 1452 to 1525, display the underlying forensic character of such record-keeping, rather than the public health context in which such records have long been understood. Diagnosing the cause and manner of death, the fundamental objective of forensic medical inquiries, exposed epistemological uncertainties that academic medicine largely avoided for the entirety of the early modern era. How could one be certain that a death was caused by a particular affliction? Our death investigation practices are now far more sophisticated, but in the current, tenacious SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we still struggle to measure and record the human costs of crisis mortality.

Counting People in Early Modern England: Registers, Registrars, and Political Arithmetic

Abstract Although there was no complete census in England until 1801, there had been counts of people for various purposes in towns and villages since the sixteenth century, and by the end of the seventeenth century political arithmeticians were trying to calculate the total population and its demographic characteristics from a range of documents, old and new. There had even been projects to collect new data from parish registers which in some respects anticipated the civil registers of vital events finally established in 1837. The aim of this paper is to look again at the invention in the sixteenth century of the sources later used for demographic investigation, especially parish registers and bills of mortality; to demonstrate that their value for such purposes was appreciated by contemporaries earlier than has often been assumed; and to show why, when their utility declined in the eighteenth century, it proved impossible to reform them. Pressure from political arithmeticians and a growing sector of the medical profession to redesign the established machinery of registration had no effect because it had become a monopoly in the hands of an ecclesiastical establishment determined to defend it. In the 1530s England acquired a precocious system of national registration, potentially adaptable to multiple uses, but it scarcely changed at all for three hundred years because there was no agreement on how to adapt or replace it.

Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Sums Theological: Doing Theology with the London Bills of Mortality, 1603–1666

AbstractFrom 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603–1604, 1625–1626, 1636, and 1665–1666). A broad survey of sermons, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and dialogues from these years reveals not only the bills’ ubiquity as an index of divine punishments, but the new kinds of intellectual work made possible by a multiplicity of numbers keyed to times and places. Claims about the moral, doctrinal, and political meanings behind the plague could now be made with an unprecedented specificity and sophistication, seized upon by High Church Anglicans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike. As an episode in the history of empirical theology, the bills’ ecclesiastical reception vindicates theology's central place in the epistemological transformations of the early modern period, as well as the influence of new kinds of empirical data on the parameters of religious thought.

Diagnosing Rickets in Early Modern England: Statistical Evidence and Social Response

Seventeenth-century UK experienced an epidemic of the newly recognised disease rickets, its nutritional and environmental causes then unknown. This is evident from parish burial registers, the London Bills of Mortality, and contemporary medical descriptions and treatments. Rickets appeared to be killing 2–8 per cent of urbanites, especially wealthy children.Rickets emerged as a threat to child health in early modern UK as a result of coal dependency and climate, and social differences in infant and child feeding. Physicians investigating rickets showed concern for rich children’s diets. Lack of breastfeeding promoted calcium deficiency among wealthy infants, while poorer children’s meagre childhood diet retarded recovery.The seasonality and age incidence of rickets deaths corroborate this diagnosis, but after 1700 rickets deaths dwindled even as medical treatises and osteological evidence suggest rickets morbidity increased. Chronology and share of mortality of other causes relating to rickets morbidity are considered: scurvy, hydrocephalus and whooping cough.

Patterns of smallpox mortality in London, England, over three centuries.

Smallpox is unique among infectious diseases in the degree to which it devastated human populations, its long history of control interventions, and the fact that it has been successfully eradicated. Mortality from smallpox in London, England was carefully documented, weekly, for nearly 300 years, providing a rare and valuable source for the study of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. We describe and analyze smallpox mortality in London from 1664 to 1930. We digitized the weekly records published in the London Bills of Mortality (LBoM) and the Registrar General's Weekly Returns (RGWRs). We annotated the resulting time series with a sequence of historical events that might have influenced smallpox dynamics in London. We present a spectral analysis that reveals how periodicities in reported smallpox mortality changed over decades and centuries; many of these changes in epidemic patterns are correlated with changes in control interventions and public health policies. We also examine how the seasonality of reported smallpox mortality changed from the 17th to 20th centuries in London.

Print, authority, and the bills of mortality in seventeenth-century London

ABSTRACT The bills of mortality, published by London’s Company of Parish Clerks during the seventeenth century, provided Londoners with epidemiological data to track the plague’s weekly and yearly development throughout London’s neighborhoods. Past scholars have argued that, while the printed bills of mortality were regarded as official and reliable documents, the elderly women parish searchers responsible for compiling the bills’ data were deemed untrustworthy. By contrast, the present essay proposes that this claim is only half true, arguing instead that Londoners maligned the elderly women searchers as a means of discrediting the printed bills of mortality. As with many printed documents in early modern England, the bills were not universally trusted and, moreover, were often co-opted by political dissenters to oppose London’s ruling authorities and their public health measures. This essay ultimately argues that the Company of Parish Clerks published their official compilation of bills known as London’s Remembrancer during a time of political strife in an effort to quell social disorder and assert the credibility of their printed bills of mortality against dissenting writers and pirated copies. Drawing from Adrian Johns’ previous work covering the Royal Society’s methods for establishing the credibility and authority printed works, this essay demonstrates how the London’s Remembrancer employs similar strategies previously outlined by Johns in order to assert the reliability and authority of the Company of Parish Clerks’ bills of mortality.

Pandemics and the development of scientific methods in the history of epidemiology


 The Covid-19 pandemic has made me see the history of epidemiology differently. Pandemics are such impressive events that they can exert urgent pressure to identify new modes of research and new methodologies to replace methods that have failed in the past. Some examples seem to corroborate this idea.
 The plagueThere is no doubt that one of the most important events in the history of science occurred in the 17th century when population thinking was discovered. All human and social sciences such as sociology, demography, Darwinian biology, political economy, statistics and epidemiology, have their origin in the discovery that dictates that events in populations can be predictable and have a probability of occurrence. Then the occurrence of events in populations can be quantified, can be compared between populations and can be the source of scientific knowledge. This true revolution in scientific thought is a consequence of changes in society that occurred due to plague pandemics.Since the great pandemic of the 14th century, outbreaks of plague in Europe caused great confusion in cities and increasingly threatened existing powers. It was the case of the monarchical society of England. In the event of an outbreak of plague in London, the nobles, the wealthy, and the army left the city, where only the poor remained. The situation became chaotic in London. It was quickly clear that there was a certain chronological regularity in the outbreaks. They started with a small but growing number of deaths in some parishes before spreading throughout the city. In the 16th century the city of London began to collect data on the number and location of pest deaths. The system was improved in the 17th century and extended to all causes of death, making it possible -by the end of the century- to organize orderly outings from London in the event of an outbreak of plague, preventing chaos. These data were printed and placed on the walls of the city. They were called the “Bills of mortality”, death posters. In this process, a temporal series of mortalitydata was established in London over decades.

Authority, autonomy and the first London Bills of Mortality

Publication of population-level data can help balance a government's need for authority with individual residents' practical need for autonomy, even during the chaos and urgency of an epidemic. Starting in the early 16th century, efforts to track the spread of epidemic plague across England and Wales included royal orders to compile weekly, parish-by-parish mortality reports. The City of London devised a novel, quantitative response: rather than producing lists of plague victims, its parishes counted up those who had died of plague and the total number buried that week to yield a local relative frequency of plague deaths. Initially, in keeping with common practices, these data were available only to London's Lord Mayor and aldermen, the sovereign, and the Privy Council. But during the plague of 1592, the City of London's printer posted large-format printed versions of each week's report in public places throughout the City, thus providing free, general access to the week's mortality data. These were the first London Bills of Mortality. Thanks to London's high numeracy rate, many residents could not only read numbers but use tables and interpret ratios. Even those with minimal numeracy could participate in discussions of the data and integrate the results into their lived experience, potentially assessing risks more accurately and making better choices. The fundamental concerns faced by London's government and residents in the 16th century are remarkably similar to those now raised by COVID-19. The broad requirements for and potential advantages of sharing a stream of useful, reliable statistical data with a numerate public also run in parallel.

Bills of Mortality: tracking disease in early modern London

In a plague year, the numbers are the narrative. “The Bill of Mortality, to all our griefs, is encreased 399 this week, and the encrease general through the whole city and suburbs, which makes us all sad”, noted Londoner Samuel Pepys on Nov 9, 1665. Those who have been following the toll of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections and deaths in the news and on social media will know how Pepys felt. But what was the Bill of Mortality?

Contagious Metaphors: Liturgies of Early Modern Plague

Contagious MetaphorsLiturgies of Early Modern Plague Kathleen Hines Between 1623 and 1666, plague's broad sweep through England resituated the borders of contagion. Eviscerating once-familiar physical bodies, the disease also transformed literary, religious, and scientific bodies of knowledge. Able to destroy the flesh and defamiliarize the body, plague also asserted its virulence most deeply by infecting language and its practice. Rebecca Totaro writes: Experience with plague was neither uniform nor isolated, but was rather simultaneously uniquely horrifying and extensive . … In their literary accounts, early moderns responded in corresponding fashion to this shape shifting terror by representing the plague as… an always hungry monster, consuming bodies regardless of age, gender, reputation, or economic status, or as a tyrant, because it so easily unseated government officials from mayors to monarchs. (19) Totaro alludes to plague's ability to consume not only the body, but also the language surrounding those bodies. Drawing her descriptions from early modern plays, political tracts, and bills of mortality, she alludes to plague's elusive power—one grounded in its ability to jump from the physical body to the metaphorical one—to shift from its microbial presence to a symbolic one in the written word. Acting as an Aristotelian metaphor, plague jumps from its embodied corpse into language. Once the source of antisepsis, language becomes the repository for the disease's spread across temporal and physical borders. Marking its presence through gruesome "buboes," or blackened and swollen lymph nodes on the infected body, the plague's corporeal course also marks its traversal through medical, theological, and literary bodies. Early modern sermons perhaps speak best to plague's dangerous translation into what Ernest Gilman calls its own figure of speech and "form of writing" (73). Gilman considers the ways that plague, "makes itself known to us only by…images and narratives… to emphasize the sense of which our understanding is made [via] a thickly elaborated poesis, while remaining still a representational remove from the thing itself" (Gilman, Plague 73–4). Like Margaret Healy, who suggests that the plague's power lies in its ability to incorporate, "a variety of bodies of knowledge [End Page 318] which we now more readily see separated into discrete disciplines, Gilman meditates on the ways that plague's contagion relies on its categorical fluidity as a term (19). The plague destroys the body, but it also disbars itself from the familiar terms writers use to define it. In England's first major seventeenth-century outbreak in 1603, homilist Roger Fenton wrote, "the word which commonly is used in scripture of the pestilence, is from a word that signifieth to speak, as some think, because, where it is everyone speaketh of it, enquireth after it, how it encreaseth, what remedies there be for it" (5). From his sermon "A Perfume Against the Noysome Pestilence prescribed by Moses unto Aaron," Fenton's words speak to the ways that plague exacerbates its contagion, speaking through language while defying language's efforts to define it. Fenton offers the sermon as a "perfume" against plague's acrid infection; by doing so, he seeks to alleviate its effects by recalculating and reordering the language that plague first invokes. In "The Dreadfulness of Plague" in 1666, Josiah Hunter echoed Fenton's words; while he labels the plague a "token of God's wrath," he more largely discourses upon its nominally evocative power: When things are more than ordinarily dreadful, it renders the very name dreadful too… and methinks the word Plague hath something of horror in it… the Scripture never speaks of it, but always one Epithete or other is given to it, as the note of a dreadful judgement. (3) Hunter defines the plague not by what it is, but by the symptoms and judgements it associatively produces. Plague, beyond its concrete presence, exists as an abstract metaphor—as the "application of a strange term either transferred from… one species to another or…by analogy" (Aristotle, qtd. from Montgomery 13). In his 1604 Demaundes and Answeres touching the Pestilence Methodically Handled, Henoch Clapham attempted to define plague by its terminological history. He etymologizes the disease the way physicians dissect the plaguy body and parses plague's meaning through...

Reading Plague in Seventeenth-century London

Interest in plague and mortality in seventeenth-century London was fed by the weekly and yearly Bills of Mortality, and by the composite or commemorative plague bills issued in epidemic years. Some surviving examples are annotated, suggesting keen engagement with the content. This paper shows that some of the weekly bills and probably some of the composite bills now in Guildhall Library, London, were owned and annotated by the city law-officer and bibliophile, Richard Smyth (1590-1675). This links up with Smyth’s personal experience of plague, his other reading and writing on the subject, and his general reading practices, to illuminate one man’s response to a fearful and recurrent feature of London life. Keywords: London, plague, Bills of Mortality, 1665

John Graunt, the Hartlib circle and child mortality in mid-seventeenth-century London

ABSTRACTJohn Graunt's pioneering study,Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality (1662)has been overlooked as a source for ideas about the importance of child mortality in an urban environment. Graunt seems to have been the first to arrive at an infant mortality rate (IMR), but this has been little explored. Graunt helped to define ‘the urban penalty’, but not in terms of the IMR. The article explains Graunt's focus on other aspects of urban mortality in relation to his need to reassure those in government, his methodology, and above all his gender. For context, the article looks at attitudes to childhood among members of the influential Hartlib circle of reformers, with which Graunt was connected. These male writers were greatly concerned about children, but seem to have shared with Graunt the traditional idea that children under the age of about seven were the responsibility of women.

Analyzing and interpreting “imperfect” Big Data in the 1600s

One of the characteristics of Big Data is that it often involves “imperfect” information. This paper examines the work of John Graunt (1620–1674) in the tabulation of diseases in London and the development of a life table using the “imperfect data” contained in London’s Bills of Mortality in the 1600s. London’s Bills of Mortality were Big Data for the 1600s, as they included information collected over time, the depth and accuracy of which improved gradually. The main shortcoming of the data available at the time was its nonuniform upkeep and the lack of depth of variables included at its outset. Due to these characteristics, it provides a perfect model for the examination of imperfect Big Data, as it has been analyzed, criticized, and interpreted repeatedly since the 1600s.

Statistics in the Hands of an Angry God? John Graunt's <em>Observations</em> in Cotton Mather's New England

Statistics in the Hands of an Angry God?John Graunt’s Observations in Cotton Mather’s New England Ted McCormick (bio) ON August 21, 1708, Ezekiel Cheever, headmaster for thirty-eight years of the Free School in Boston, died at the age of ninety-four. Cotton Mather delivered the funeral sermon. His theme was the shortness of life. In a striking passage, he addressed in the language of numbers the crop of young scholars Cheever had left behind. “Children,” he commanded, “Go unto the Burying-place; There you will see many a Grave shorter than your selves. ’Tis now upon Computation found, That more than half the Children of men Dy before they come to be Seventeen Years of Age.”1 Four years later, while a winter epidemic ravaged Connecticut, Mather again referred his hearers to the cold statistics of political arithmetic: The Extent of Mortality is Universal. . . . They that have made Nice Remarks, on Bills of Mortality, will tell you; That one half of those that are Born, don’t Live Seventeen years: That but about Forty of an hundred, are found Alive, at Sixteen years; That but Ten out of an hundred, at Forty Six; but Six, at Fifty Six; but Three at Sixty-six; but One at Seventy-six. Were there as many Nations, as we are now Entertain’d with Snow-drifts; or as many [End Page 563] Persons as we can see Flakes of Snow; Death, Death will quickly melt them all away.2 In another funeral sermon four years after that, Mather queried the psalmist’s dictum (Psalm 90:10) that “the Days of our Years are three score Years and ten.” He enjoined his parishioners to “form a Computation” of how few would reach that mark when “More than Half the Children of Men, fall so short of Seventy, that it is affirm’d, they die short of Seventeen.” Indeed, he averred, “if the Clerks of our Trained Companies would bring in their Lists, and compare them” with those of twenty years earlier, they would seem “so many Bills of Mortality.”3 Where did these numbers come from, what did they mean to Mather, and what were they doing in his sermons? The first question is the easiest to answer: the source of Mather’s numbers was the “bible” of early quantitative demography, John Graunt’s 1662 Natural and Political Observations . . . upon the Bills of Mortality. Graunt, an enthusiastic adherent of Baconian natural philosophy and the only tradesman among the early Fellows of the Royal Society, had gathered London’s scattered weekly mortality bills and applied his “Shop-Arithmetique” to analyzing the whole.4 His conclusions, offered simultaneously to the state and the community of scientific virtuosi, ranged from the inefficiency of the poor laws to the unhealthiness of London and the unnaturalness of polygamy and celibacy.5 Among the highlights of this “political arithmetic,” however, was a rudimentary table of life expectancy.6 According to this table, making allowances for the fact that “men do not die in exact Proportions, nor in Fractions,” mortality rates remained roughly constant at every given age, from six to seventy-six.7 [End Page 564] Thus Graunt found that of one hundred live births, only about sixty-four would survive past six years, forty past sixteen, and so on. These were the numbers that Mather—a scientific amateur and eventually a Fellow of the Royal Society himself—faithfully repeated. But what did these numbers mean to Mather? What was a life table from Restoration London doing in Boston sermons fifty years later? To date, the only study to answer these questions does so from the point of view of historical demography. According to Daniel Scott Smith and J. David Hacker, Mather and other Congregationalists, grasping the fact that perceptions of mortality influenced behavior, stressed the extreme variation in individual life spans—reinforcing the notion that each life was in God’s hands—and overemphasized the risk of mortality in the short term. This unwitting yet convenient misrepresentation of risk dovetailed neatly with Graunt’s table, which incorrectly assumed a fixed mortality rate for every decade above six years of age, exaggerating the probability of death for...

Yet Another Inquiry into the Trustworthiness of Eighteenth-Century Bills of Mortality: the Newcastle and Gateshead Bills, 1736–1840

This note is a preliminary analysis of the Newcastle and Gateshead Bills of Mortality, a hitherto unused source for understanding some of the most significant aspects of vital registration and burial practices in the North East's capital, c. 1736-1840. The Bills are annual totals of the number of burials and baptisms which took place in all of the ancient Anglican parishes in Newcastle and Gateshead. One of the most lucid aspects of the Bills is that they recorded the number of burials which took place in the 'infamous' un-consecrated burial ground of Ballast Hills located on the outskirts of the east-end of the town. Attention here is given to the initial accuracy of the Bills by focusing upon All Saints parish in Newcastle which accounted for approximately 50 per cent of the town's total population over the entire period. Here the data revealed in the Bills are compared directly with the burials which were registered by the parish clerk in All Saints. The major finding of this preliminary study is the huge discrepancy between the number of reported burials and the number of baptisms which took place in All Saints over time. The Bills also provide a fully documented account of the impact of Ballast Hills and the apparent "export in corpses" which was clearly taking place on a large scale. By the 1770s-1790s, this one burial ground alone, was consuming roughly 60-70 per cent of the town's dead population. The reasons behind this phenomenon are discussed by looking specifically at the possible impact of religious dissent, burial costs and burial space in the town. The note concludes that while this preliminary analysis is revealing, more work needs to be done which would involve a fuller analysis of all of the parishes recorded in the Bills as well as looking more closely at the registration of baptisms, stillbirths and the heavy "traffic in corpses" which was clearly a major defect of vital registration in Georgian Newcastle.

Ralph Tailor's Summer: A Scrivener, his City and the Plague, by Keith Wrightson

To someone who has worked on the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the prospect of a study of the seventeenth-century plague seen ‘from below’ (p. xi) is both exciting and envy-inducing. Keith Wrightson’s latest book promises a micro-history of the 1636 plague outbreak in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The ensuing civic mortality, across the months of June to October, is calculated here as around 47 per cent— which is of the order now usually accepted for the plague of 1348–9 across England as a whole. The Newcastle figure is inevitably approximate, deriving as it does from bills of mortality and incomplete records of burial, set against the Hearth Tax returns for 1665. All these sources are problematic to some degree, but none of them is available for the fourteenth century. Nor would an historian of Britain, at least, attempt to construct a study of the Black Death around the experience of an individual. Wrightson’s hero (and the word is not inappropriate), Ralph Tailor, was a young scrivener, who stuck at his job through the plague months of 1636, and survived to become a distinguished local figure, dying in 1669. It was the nuncupative wills of plague victims, recorded by Tailor, that drew Wrightson to the topic in the first place and which provide the most powerful chapters in the book, evoking the networks of kinship and friendship among plague victims and survivors. Beyond this, there is sometimes a sense of bricks being made without enough straw. Seventeenth-century Newcastle is conjured up effectively, helped along by nineteenth-century photographs of streets demonstrably still pre-modern, but Tailor remains a shadowy figure. Wrightson struggles to provide him with a family context—his surname is just too common for any certainty—and, in the absence of personal papers, Tailor never quite escapes from his role as a framing device, ‘mov[ing] from room to room taking notes’ for inventories. His own response to the situation in which he found himself remains unknowable. In that respect, the present study is at one with discussions of medieval outbreaks of plague: an unmediated personal account is the rarest of sources. Wrightson tacitly concedes that although he started out with the intention of describing the experience of plague ‘more fully than had been attempted hitherto’ that has not quite come off (p. 158). Even so, the book does raise some interesting questions about the response to plague, especially when viewed from a longer, pre-Reformation perspective. The religious dimension in this discussion is largely provided by the local Puritan preacher Robert Jenison, who, in over 250 pages, expatiated on the plague as the response of an angry God to the sins of his people. Although Jenison eschewed the ‘popish manner of pacifying God’s wrath’, his recommended response of confession of sin, contrition and reformation of life is impeccably ‘medieval’ in essentials. Wrightson regards the fervour of Jenison’s take on the plague as exceptional, as no doubt it was, and is inclined to argue that most people, while probably recognising some causal connection between plague and human sinfulness, did not get particularly worked up by it. This may be true, although the claim rests primarily on the preambles to their wills, which, as Wrightson allows, is a dangerous argument. One also wonders whether, post-Reformation, there were simply fewer ways in which such anxieties might be made visible—although, admittedly, we have no real way of assessing the response to the medieval Church’s calls for penitential processions and the like. Wrightson is on stronger ground when he takes issue with the familiar literary trope of the abandonment of the dying by family and friends, seeing the Newcastle experience rather as testimony to neighbourly solidarity in the face of adversity. That the dead were left to die alone is clearly a cliché, but its repetition in medieval accounts of the plague does seem to tap into real anxieties that what constituted a ‘good’ death—companionship round the death-bed and the last rites—was becoming unattainable. Ultimately, it is hard to know how deep the differences between the fourteenth- and seventeenth-century experience of the plague really ran. Was the former genuinely a far more cataclysmic experience, prompting a correspondingly dramatic human response? After all, terrifying as individual outbreaks might be, the early modern world had the measure of the plague in the sense that people knew that, in the end, it went away again—knowledge denied to those living through the 1347–50 outbreak. In Wrightson’s words, ‘They envisioned a future for others if not for themselves’ (p. 161). Or is the enduring force of social relationships and a stoical attention to business-as-normal the real picture that lies behind the apocalyptic imagery of clerical writers of the fourteenth century, as it does behind Jenison’s rhetoric? That must be at least partly the case, and Ralph Tailor is a useful reminder that life went on.

The tabulation of England: how the social world was brought in rows and columns

This article chooses a historical approach to examine the influence of media practices in the constitution of sociological knowledge. Starting from the assumption that processes of technical mediation are more disputed and hence more visible in the beginnings of a science than in their state of maturity, it delves into the prehistory of sociological knowledge. From a genealogical viewpoint it becomes quite clear that the birth of a scientific knowledge about society in the seventeenth century is a birth from the spirit (or better: from the medium) of the table. Focusing on John Graunt's Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662) which is not only a book about tables but itself an eminent example of tabular thinking, this text tries to explore the epistemological effects which are implied in the use of forms, lists, and tables. The problem addressed can be outlined by the question: What happens to the knowledge of the social world (and what happens to this world itself) when it is brought into a tabular grid?