| Abstract: | This is an enquiry into how eighteenth-century London's Bills of Mortality were compiled. It concludes that while they remain tolerably accurate in aggregate, particularly when considered over a number of years, they are liable to be very misleading if particular localities or parishes are considered. They are a record of registered burials-not deaths-of most of those who had been baptised as Anglicans, so they omit some burial grounds within London, and some dissenters. Crucially, they are most misleading guides to those who had died in one parish but whose family chose to have them buried in another. Several London parishes deliberately undercut their neighbours by charging lower burial fees to attract custom; others opened extra-parochial burial grounds. St Martin-in-the-Fields offers an example of the latter from 1806, but the scale of the new burial ground was not large and it was mainly confined to those who had died in the workhouse. Much more significant was the neighbouring parish of St Anne Soho, which at its peak period in the 1760s to the 1790s was alone handling the equivalent of between 2 and 5 per cent of all Anglican burials within the total area of London's Bills of Mortality. This was only one, though perhaps a particularly egregious, London parish, while the export of corpses to one's erstwhile 'home' parish demonstrates why the Bills cannot be trusted in their detailed geography, as well as providing a warning to all English population historians confronted with a sudden fall or rise in their burial totals. |
