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The London Bills of Mortality

One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern London was plague.
Starting in 1603, government officials published weekly plague
mortality statistics in a broadside series known as the Bills of
Mortality. The bills grew to include not just plague deaths but also
dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their continued publication
for decades after the final outbreak of plague in England.

Database Visualizations
Death by Numbers

Welcome to the Bills of Mortality Project

Between 1603 and 1752, almost 8,000 different weekly bills were
published. Death by Numbers aims to transcribe and publish the
information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational
analysis.

Explore the data: This is an ongoing project: the datasets are not
complete.

Read all about it: Check out our blog for historical context, project
updates, and an inside look at our processes.

Latest Posts

December 4, 2023 * Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks
of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis

November 27, 2023 * Comparing the Bills of Mortality and Old Bailey
Proceedings

November 7, 2023 * Death by Numbers: the Monarchical Bills of
Mortality, 1665-1669

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viewing the data

The Plague Database

Explore the full plague bills database.

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knowing the data

Visualizing the Plague

Transcribing the plague bills means new approaches for data
visualization and exploring patterns in the data.

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read about our research

Blog Posts & Essays

Read our ongoing research into the London plague bills.

Bills of Mortality is generously funded by the National Science
Foundation and developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and
New Media at George Mason University.

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media George Mason
University National Science Foundation