During the early modern period, the city of London produced weekly mortality reports called bills of mortality. These bills—printed from 1603 onward—detail the number of deaths per parish; plague deaths per parish; and deaths citywide by cause of death. However printed bills were actually summaries of manuscript bills produced for the monarch, which contain a parish-by-parish breakdown of every cause of death throughout the city of London for the preceding week. The monarchical bills enable us to study not just plague deaths by parish, but also every type of death that Londoners tracked in the bills of mortality.

During the early modern period, the city of London produced weekly mortality reports called bills of mortality. These bills—printed from 1603 onward—detail the number of deaths per parish; plague deaths per parish; and deaths citywide by cause of death. However printed bills were actually summaries of manuscript bills produced for the monarch, which contain a parish-by-parish breakdown of every cause of death throughout the city of London for the preceding week. The monarchical bills enable us to study not just plague deaths by parish, but also every type of death that Londoners tracked in the bills of mortality.

Samuel Pepys is primarily remembered for his decade-long diary, which recorded major events in 17th century English history including the Great Plague Outbreak (1665).¹ Just before the height of the plague, on September 7, 1665, Pepys wrote in his diary, “[I] sent for the Weekely Bill, and find 8,252 dead in all, and of them 6,878 of the plague; which is a most dreadfull number, and shows reason to fear the plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us.” ² While Pepys’ remark over the number of plague deaths was numerically incorrect (our records indicate the number of plague deaths was actually 6,978), Pepys was right to worry about the amount of death and the vice grip that plague held in London.³

We find a lot of very specific deaths in the London Bills of Mortality that are…well…meme-able. It isn’t that death is funny, but rather, the descriptions of death in the bills can be so that one can’t help but chuckle. And considering the heavy subject matter of our project, we relish those moments. So, while our team took a well deserved break from transcribing the bills, we shared “12 Days of Death” on Twitter

We are in the process of building out a data API to support the data work we’re undertaking with the transcription of the plague bills. We anticipate hundreds of thousands of rows of data by the end of our transcription process, and we wanted an easy and efficient way to work with that data.

As part of our work in data-driven historical research at RRCHNM, we are building a data API to store and access data from databases. Following the process of transforming the DataScribe transcriptions into tidy data, the resulting data is uploaded to a PostgreSQL database where we can take advantage of relational connections among the different datasets we’ve compiled.

One of the ways we are using the transcribed bills of mortality is in data visualization and mapping, in an effort to ask new questions and revisit old ones.

At the Southern History Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore, we presented preliminary work on data visualization and the data API. An interactive notebook on this early work is available on Observable for perusal (note, the page may take a moment to load the 100,000+ records). You may also make a copy of this notebook to your own Observable account to edit.