# The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty/Volume 1/Introduction/Bills

The 'Introduction' to the Economic Writings of Sir William Petty is written by Charles Henry Hull, who was also the editor of the two volumes of the economic writings (Cambridge 1899).
The 'Introduction' consists of seven sections:
* Petty's Life
* Graunt's Life
* The Authorship of the "Observations upon the Bills of Mortality"
* Petty's Letters and Other Manuscripts
* Petty's Economic Writings
* Graunt and the Science of Statistics
* On the Bills of Mortality
ON THE BILLS OF MORTALITY.
Almost all of Graunt's "Observations" and a large portion of Petty's "Essays" are based on the London bills of mortality. Some knowledge of the history and character of the bills is therefore necessary to an appreciation of those writings. Accordingly the gradual elaboration of the Parish Clerk's bills from crude weekly returns of the progress of the plague, through a long series of changes, to the form finally superseded by the Registrar-General's bills in 1840, is here traced as far as the year 1686, the last year of whose bills Petty made use, and an attempt is made to estimate the accuracy of the seventeenth century bills in several particulars.
So far as is known, no set of the London bills of mortality before 1658 escaped the great fire of September, 1666 and there is, in consequence, some doubt as to the time at which they originated. Graunt's assertion that the bills first began in the year 1592 accords with the official statement put forth, after the Plague of 1665 and before the Fire, by John Bell, clerk to the Company of Parish Clerks, to rectify "the many and gross mistakes which have been imposed upon the World, by divers Ignorant Scriblers about the weekly Accompts of former Visitations." Bell says that he could find in the Parish Clerks' Hall no record of more antiquity than 21 December, 1592; the bills, therefore, must have begun at that date. In 1595, he continues, the plague ceased, and on the 18th December of that year the bills were accordingly discontinued ​and were laid aside as useless until 21 December, 1603, "at which time they were again resumed and continued unto this day." On this point Bell is particularly emphatic "I deny not," he says, "that there might be, and I believe was, a very grievous Pestilence which raged here in some part of the Year 1603.... You may ask me why then I do not give a better account of that Pestilential Year? I answer. That in that Year the Parish Clerks gave not any accompt thereof; and although I think it not impossible, yet it is very improbable, that any particular man should give a just accompt thereof."
In regard to the date at which the bills began, both Bell and Graunt are mistaken. There may have been bills even as early as 1517 and original weekly bills assigned, with much probability, to 1532 and to 1535, are still preserved. These bills doubtless owe their existence to the known timidity of Henry VIII. in the face of the plague, and it is probable that they were not long continued after the disease ceased. Indeed, the French ambassador, though he was very certain that fear of infection could not be, as was given out, the true reason why Anne of Cleves went to Richmond in the summer of 1540, was still unable to find any better ground for his scepticism than the mere assertion that "there is no talk at present of the plague" in London. Throughout the period from 1550 to 1563 there was, probably, little or no plague in the city and consequently less occasion to continue the weekly reports. But the new outbreak of the epidemic in the last named year apparently caused them to be resumed, and we know of weekly figures for 1563-1566, for 1574 for 1578-1583 for 1592-1595, ​and for 1597— 1600. Inasmuch as a large portion of these returns, those preserved by Stow from 14 July, 1564, to 26 July, 1566 and all the Bodleian figures, 1597-1600, cover periods almost free from infection, it may perhaps be inferred that after 1563 the weekly returns continued to be made out with considerable regularity during the rest of the century. In any event it is clear that they antedate 1592 and were not discontinued from 1595 to 1603. We might perhaps save Bell's reputation for accuracy in the matter by assuming that the sixteenth century bills were compiled by some one else than the Company of Parish Clerks. We know, indeed, that the deaths in 1535 were certified by the Lord Mayor, and we do not know how he ascertained the facts; but it is probable that he employed the Parish Clerks even then to collect the information, and it is almost certain that in and after 1563 the bills were made out by that company.
Graunt professes to give the deaths from the plague and from other causes in each week of 1603 from 17 March to the end of December. Apparently he had also the figures, at least of the christenings, from December, 1602 to March, 1603. In other words he claims information for a whole year of which Bell asserts that the Parish Clerks gave no account until December twenty-first. And Graunt's figures are confirmed in part, while Bell's assertion is completely refuted, by an original printed bill for the week 13—20 October, 1603, preserved in the Guildhall Library. Concerning the figures for 1592, also, there is a disagreement between Bell and Graunt. Graunt gives figures of the total deaths and of the plague deaths from 17 March, 1592, to the 22nd December, whereas Bell believes that the 21st December of that year marks the beginning of the bills. Noting that "the Weekly and General Bills in the year 1593 did bare date from Thursday to Thursday...... and that they continued that course until the year 1629," Bell goes on to observe that "all the Papers that make mention of the Great Plague ​in the years 1592, 1593, 1603 and 1625 bear date the 17th of March in all the said years... making that day Epidemical as well as the year Pestilential." "But I think it very strange," says he, "nor do I believe that the 17th March in all the said years did fall out to be on a Thursday: but I conceive that what is contained in them, was gleaned from some false scattered papers, printed in some of those years." In this opinion Bell is right, so far as Graunt's figures for 1592 are concerned; but in his inference that no bills existed in 1592 he is plainly mistaken.
The manner in which the bills were first published is not altogether clear. In Graunt's time they were regularly printed, and the weekly bills were supplied to subscribers at four shillings a year. The editor of the "Collection of the yearly Bills of Mortality" says that "In 1625, the bills of mortality having now acquired a general reputation, the company of parish clerks obtained a decree or act, under the seal of the High-commission-court, or Star-chamber, for the keeping of a printing press in their hall, in order to the printing of the weekly and general bills within the city of London and liberties thereof; for which purpose a printer was assigned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. And on the 18th of July that year, a printing press was accordingly set up, and an order then made, that from henceforth the weekly reports of the burials, within the limits aforesaid, should be printed, with the number of burials against every parish; which till that time had not been done."
This Dr Ogle interprets to mean that the bills were first printed in 1625. But it is certain that in one instance, at least, a weekly bill was printed as early as 1603 "by John Windet, printer to the Honourable City of London," and in 1610 the printing of a blank form for the weekly bills appears to have been the custom. Still it is not improbable that the Parish Clerks possessed no press of their own until 1625, and that may be all that the editor of the "Collection" intends to assert.
If the method by which the bills were made public during the earlier part of the seventeenth century is uncertain, the manner of their publication in the sixteenth century is involved in still greater ​obscurity. Graunt implies that for the figures before 1629 he was forced to have recourse to the unpublished records in the Parish Clerks Hall, and Dr Ogle suggests that the earlier figures preserved by Stow may have been obtained by that antiquary in a similar way. On the other hand letters of the sixteenth century, preserved at the State Paper Office, show that in times of infection the weekly figures were known to many persons. Perhaps the facts were regularly ascertained after 1563 but were made public during the pestilence only.
Whatever may have been the first year of the bills, and however early their first publication, they were regularly made out by the Parish Clerks for more than two centuries after 1603. In 1849 they ceased, being practically superseded by the new bills issued, since 1840, under the authority of the Registrar-General.
With the growth of London the number of parishes included within the bills of mortality steadily increased. The MS. bill of 16—23 November, 1532, enumerates thirty-seven parishes in which persons died of the plague, and adds "there is this weke clere iii$^{xx}$ and iii paryshes." In the bill of 1535, likewise, one hundred parishes are included, but in 1563 the number has risen to one hundred and eight in the city and liberties In 1595 the bills gave returns, it is said, for one hundred and nine parishes arranged alphabetically without distinction of locality. In 1604 the included area was enlarged to 120 parishes and these were divided, for the purpose of the bills, into three groups. The first group comprised the ninety-six parishes within the walls. This group was subsequently increased by the addition, after 1622, of St James, Duke Place, completing the group of "97 parishes within the walls" as enumerated by Graunt on pages 338—340. During the period discussed by Graunt and by Petty (1604—1686) no further change ​of importance was made in the area or in the composition of this group of parishes, save that the weekly bills from September, 1666, to May, 1669 have, instead of ninety-seven parishes, "the 16 parishes (now standing) within the walls."
The second of the three groups formed in 1604 included the parishes without the walls, but partly within the liberties of the city. Thirteen of these were within the bills in 1597. In 1604 there were added St Bartholomew the Great, Bridewell Precinct, and Trinity in the Minories, making up the "sixteen parishes without the walls, standing part within the Liberties and part without, in Middlesex and Surrey." This group, enumerated by Graunt on pages 340—341, remained unaltered until 1673, when its area was diminished by the transfer of part of St Saviour's parish, under the name of Christ Church, Surrey, to the group of twelve out-parishes then existing.
The third of the groups of parishes instituted in 1604 has a more varied history. Consisting originally of the eight "out parishes" first brought within the bills in 1604, it was enlarged, in 1606, by the addition of St Mary, Savoy, making the "Nine out Parishes in Middlesex and Surrey" which Graunt names on page 341. In 1647 the number of parishes but not the area of this group was further increased by the introduction into the bills of St Paul, Covent Garden, taken, Graunt says, out of St Giles and St Martin.
In addition to these three groups—the parishes within the walls, the parishes without the walls but at least partly within the liberties, and the parishes in Middlesex and Surrey, situated without the liberties but adjacent to London—the bills also included, after 1626, the city of Westminster, which was, for this purpose, reckoned as St Margaret parish. During the plague of 1636 there were added the six circumjacent parishes of Islington, Hackney, Stepney, Rotherhithe, Newington, and Lambeth, thus raising the total number of parishes within the bills to one hundred and twenty-nine or, after 1647, to one hundred and thirty. This is the classification of parishes which Graunt has in view in his discussion of the growth of the city .
​The year 1660 saw a regrouping of the parishes which established the classification still in force when Petty wrote. The two groups of parishes within the liberties remained, with the exception of Christ Church, Southwark, above noted, as they had been before 1660. But the third group, "the Out-parishes, now called ten, formerly nine, and before that eight," was divided. Four parishes of this group were classified with St Margaret as "the five parishes within the city and liberties of Westminster," while the remaining six parishes were joined with the six parishes added in 1636 to make the "twelve parishes lying in Middlesex and Surrey." After 1660 there were, therefore, four groups of parishes within the bills, viz, the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, the sixteen parishes without the walls, the five parishes in Westminster, and the twelve out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey. To these one hundred and thirty parishes there were added, between 1660 and 1686, four others. St Paul, Shadwell, which first appeared in the weekly bill of 4—11 April, 1671, was reckoned the thirteenth out-parish, and a fourteenth out-parish, Christ Church, Surrey, was added in the bill of 16—23 December, 1673. Since Christ Church had been formerly a part of St Saviour, Southwark, this change made no alteration in the total area within the bills. It simply transferred to the group of out-parishes an area which, since 1604, had been reckoned to the parishes within the liberties. This transfer is without significance for Petty's arguments. The two remaining additions are St James, Westminster and St Anne, Westminster, raising the Westminster group of parishes to six, and afterwards to seven. Since both of these parishes were taken out of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which already belonged to the Westminster group, no change of area or of distribution was effected.
​The form and contents of the bills of mortality have varied greatly since their beginning. In 1532 and 1535 the weekly bills gave the total number of burials and the number of plague burials by parishes, adding a summation of parishes clear and parishes infected. As early as 1578, if not before, the bills gave also the number of christenings. In 1603, if not earlier, the figures of the weekly bills are summed up in December, by a "general or yearly bill ." According to Graunt, the yearly bill did not particularize the several parishes until the year 1625, and his assertion is implicitly confirmed by Bell, who thus excuses himself from describing the form of bills: "I think I need not trouble myself herein, since that worthy and ingenious gentleman, Captain John Graunt, in his Book of Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality, hath already so well described them." In the absence of definite evidence to the contrary it may be assumed, therefore, that Graunt is right and that the yearly bills did not enumerate the several parishes until much later than the weekly bills.
The gradual extension of the bills to include territory not originally comprised within their limits, has been already traced. It remains to describe their enlargement by the addition of matter new to them. The first additional matter of importance was the specification of those casualties and diseases, other than the plague, which resulted in death. According to Graunt the causes of non-plague burials were ascertained and entered in the Hallbooks "in the very first year." Bell likewise says that the parishes within the walls, "ever since the year 1604, brought to the Company of Parish Clerks Hall, not only the number of all the christenings and burials, but also an accompt of all the diseases and casualties, although no such accompt was published to the world until the Year 1629." The correctness of Bell's assertion turns upon the interpretation of the word "published," for it is certain that the weekly bills of 5—12 November, 1607, and 10—17 August, 1609, were endorsed in MS. with various causes of death. I have found, ​however, no early weekly bills upon which the causes of death were printed. The next additional matter introduced into the bills was a distinction of the burials and christenings according to sex. This distinction, introduced for the returns from London and its liberties, in 1629 was extended, in 1660, to Westminster and the out-parishes. Important features not appearing in the bills before 1686 are the number of marriages, the omission of which Graunt notes, and the age at death, which he makes an attempt to supply by an estimate. Both of these details Petty desired to see introduced into the Dublin bills, and they were actually included in the London bills of a later date.
The general trustworthiness of the bills, and consequently the validity of all conclusions based upon them, is conditioned by the accuracy and the completeness with which the Parish Clerks knew the facts that they professed to report. It is therefore important to enquire how they obtained their knowledge of the number of christenings, marriages, and burials and of the causes of death within their respective parishes. The earliest indication of the method pursued is found in the plague orders of the Lord Mayor, issued in 1581. He directed the aldermen:
The manner in which all the searches proceeded in a case of death is thus described by Graunt:
Graunt, who clearly understood how difficult it sometimes is to determine the cause of death, discusses at considerable length the question whether such ancient matrons, "perhaps ignorant and careless," could make correct returns even if they would, and he hints pretty strongly that inaccuracies due to their ignorance may be increased in some cases by their veniality. He is therefore inclined to distrust their reports in the more difficult cases. Petty, with characteristic practical shrewdness, proposed to meet this difficulty by the enumeration, in his model Dublin bills, of but twenty-four casualties, "being such as may be discerned by common sense and without Art, conceiving that more will perplex and imbroil the account" His suggestion remained without effect. Indeed it seems that the very lame defence of the searchers put forth by Bell in reply to Graunt' s strictures, must have been considered quite adequate, for in spite of the sharp but just criticism passed by ​Maitland in 1756 and by the editor of the "Collection of the Yearly Bills" in 1759, no material amendment was effected in the administration of the London Vital Statistics until they came under the supervision of the Registrar-General.
To determine the mere number of persons who died, or were born or married, is much less difficult than to determine the causes of their death; but even in the former respects the seventeenth century bills leave much to be desired. Graunt himself pointed out "that there hath been a neglect in the Accompt of the Christenings," and explains that this "hath been neglected more than that of Burials" because religious scruples played a larger part in the former case. But even the record of burials included, as a rule, only those buried according to the service of the Church of England. Roman Catholics and non-conformists interred in their own burying grounds were entirely omitted from the bills. Now as late as 1676 Petty calculated on the basis of the Bishop's Survey, that these omitted classes were nearly five per cent of the population of England and it is generally admitted that in the twenty-five years after the Restoration the proportion of non-conformists had considerably decreased. Besides this, it seems that even conformists buried elsewhere than in the parish churches or cemeteries, e.g. in St Paul's, the Charter House, or the hospitals, were omitted from the bills. Further than this Dr Ogle has shown by comparison of the printed or manuscript registers of many parish churches with the number of burials returned from those parishes by the bills, that the Parish Clerks were often careless in making the returns even of members of the Established Church buried in their own parish cemeteries, and that the number in the bills is more frequently an understatement than an exaggeration. It seems, however, that ​when a sufficient series of years is taken, the discrepancy arising from this source during the seventeenth century is not large. And, finally, the number of persons who died in London but were buried in the country far exceeded the number dying in the country but buried in London. How great the error due to this fact may have been in the seventeenth century, we have no means of knowing. In the middle of the eighteenth it was very plausibly calculated at one sixth of the whole number. Taking all these facts into account, it is not too much to assume that we must add a correction of at least fifteen per cent. to the figures of burials in the pre-Restoration bills, and not less than ten per cent. to the later figures which Petty uses, in order to obtain an approximately correct estimate of the actual mortality of London at the dates in question. Inasmuch as both Graunt and Petty base their estimates of London's population upon the burials reported in the bills, the numbers which they deduce must be pronounced too small, even upon the assumption of a death rate that justified them in multiplying by only thirty. But their other important deductions from the bills, such as the determination of the approximate numerical equality between the sexes, the discovery that the most healthy years are also the most fruitful, and even their calculations of the growth of the city, are far less affected by the incompleteness of the original returns. In fact if the cases omitted were, as seems not improbable, similar or proportional to those included, the effect of the omissions upon the validity of most of their conclusions would be almost negligibly small.
So far as the "country bills" used by Graunt are concerned, it is probable that the parish registers from which they were derived were kept more carefully after Cromwell's registration Act of 1653 than before it. If so we can account not only for the increase of the weddings, which Graunt explains in another way, but also for the contemporaneous increase of the births and the burials.
* ↑ Creighton, History of Epidemics, i. 532.
* ↑ P. 335.
* ↑ See p. 426.
* ↑ London's Remembrancer: or A true Accompt of every particular Weeks christnings and mortality In all the Years of pestilence Within the Cognizance of the Bills of Mortality. London: Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, Printer to the Company of Parish Clerks, 1665. 4to. unpaged.
* ↑ Hist, MSS. Com., x. pt. 4, p. 447; Creighton, i. 290, 294, note.
* ↑ Brit. Mus. Egerton MSS. 2603, fol. 4; transcribed by Creighton, i. 295—296.
* ↑ Record Office, State Papers, Henry VIII., 4633.
* ↑ Marrilac to Montmorency, 6 July, 1540, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, xv. 419. The inference seems to be confirmed by J. G. Nichols's note to Machyn's Diary, 319, and by Caius's Councill against the Sweat (1552), as reprinted by Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle Ages, third ed., p. 330.
* ↑ Creighton, i. 304. It seems, however, that reports were made for a few weeks during the sweat of 1551. Ibid., 261.
* ↑ Stow's memoranda in Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles, edited by Gairdner (Camden Soc., n. p. 28) 123—125, 144—147.
* ↑ Holinshed's Chronicle, iv. 325.
* ↑ Creighton, i. 341—343; the original figures are at Hatfield House.
* ↑ Graunt, p. 335, post. Bell above.
* ↑ Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS., 824, ff. 196—199; printed pp. 433—435, post.
* ↑ Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, ix. no. 151, 279, 341, 451.
* ↑ Christie, Some Account of the Parish Clerks, 133—135. The bills of 1603, concerning which Graunt and Bell disagree, are admitted to be the Clerks' work.
* ↑ In the table at p. 426.
* ↑ See p. 366.
* ↑ In "Political Tracts, 1680, PP." There are also other reasons for believing Graunt correct, see pp. 426—428, post.
* ↑ In the table at p. 426.
* ↑ Cf. p. 426—427.
* ↑ P. 9.
* ↑ Confirmed on 24 February, 1636, State Papers, Dom., Charles I., Docquet.
* ↑ Inquiry into the Trustworthiness of the old Bills of Mortality, in Jour. Stat. Soc., LV. 437—460
* ↑ See p. 336, note also p. 426.
* ↑ P. 335.
* ↑ Inquiry, 439.
* ↑ Ogle, Inquiry, 437 n., citing Stow's Annals (ed. 1631), 657.
* ↑ Maitland, ii. 737.
* ↑ The number 109 is confirmed by the abstracts of weekly bills for 1597—1600 in the Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS., 824, f. 196. See pp. 433—436.
* ↑ This church was consecrated 2 January, 1622, and in the first year of Charles I. it was, after a dispute with St Katharine Creechurch, judicially declared a parish church. Seymour, Survey, i. 313. Bell says the parish was not included in the bills until 1626. It appears, however, in the weekly bill of 4—11 August, 1625 (Brit. Mus. 1298 m. ii.).
* ↑ See below p. lxxxvi.
* ↑ The Act erecting this parish passed the House of Commons 7 January, 1645. Commons' Journal, iv. 398.
* ↑ P. 380.
* ↑ In the weekly bill of 14—21 April, see p. 344—345 and table at p. 426.
* ↑ Chapter ix. pp. 378—381 post.
* ↑ In 1683—86, p. 457.
* ↑ Graunt, p. 380.
* ↑ St Clement Danes, St Paul, Covent Garden, St Martin-in-the- Fields, and St Mary, Savoy.
* ↑ P. 345.
* ↑ Erected by Private Act of 22 Charles II. 27. Taken out of Stepney.
* ↑ Erected by Private Act 22, 23 Charles II. 12, an Act for making the Manor of Paris Garden a Parish. Seymour, Survey, ii. 816.
* ↑ In the weekly bill 14—21 July 1685. The Act, i James II. is the last in the table of statutes printed for 1685.
* ↑ In the weekly bill 30 March—6 April, 1686. Private Act, 30 Charles II. 7.
* ↑ See p. 457 note.
* ↑ Ogle's Inquiry has an appendix on "Successive Changes in the Area covered by the Bills." Jour, Stat. Soc., iv. 453—455.
* ↑ Creighton, i. 341, citing the MS. at Hatfield House.
* ↑ Maitland says he saw a general bill for 1563 in the library of Sir Hans Sloane. Hist. of London, ii. 736. Sloane's library has passed to the British Museum, but the general bill for 1563 appears not to be there.
* ↑ P. 337.
* ↑ P. 346.
* ↑ It seems probable that the causes of death other than the plague were made public before 1629. Thus Dr Mead, writing to Sutteville, gives the weekly deaths of smallpox in May and June, 1628. [Birch's] Court and Times of Charles I. Vol. i. p. 359, cited by Creighton, ii. 435.
* ↑ Much interest appears to have been taken in the form of bills by Lord Mayor Chamberlain (1607) and his successors, and several changes were made, particulars of which cannot now be recovered. Christie, 138—140; cf. note, p. 336, post. So considerable were the disagreements, especially with some of the out-parishes, that in 1611 the Company of Parish Clerks were reincorporated and their powers more precisely defined. State Papers, Dom., James I. Vol. xlvii. Docquet, 31 December, 1611.
* ↑ Graunt, p. 342.
* ↑ Bell (unpaged).
* ↑ P. 347.
* ↑ Pp. 386—387.
* ↑ Pp. 488—489.
* ↑ State Papers, Elizabeth, Vol. xlviii. no. 70, printed by Creighton, i. 319. The date of the order "heretofore provided" regarding searches cannot be determined, but they are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539. Ibid., i. 320.
* ↑ P. 346.
* ↑ P. 347.
* ↑ Pp. 356, 357.
* ↑ Pp- 347—361.
* ↑ P. 491; the London bills in Graunt's day distinguished no less than 81 causes of death. Cf. the table facing page 406.
* ↑ Bell says, "Searchers are generally ancient women, and I think are therefore most fit for their office. But sure I am they are chosen by some of the eminentest men of the Parish to which they stand related; and if any of their Choosers should speak against their abilities they would much disparage their own judgements. And after such choice they are examined touching their sufficiency, and sworn to that office by the Dean of Arches, or some Justice of the Peace, as the cause shall require." This seventeenth century English demonstration of official competence, which, mutatis mutandis, sounds strangely familiar to nineteenth century American ears, Bell clinches by adding "I presume there cannot be a stricter obligation than an oath to bind any person." London's Remembrancer (not paged).
* ↑ History of London, ii. 740, seq.
* ↑ Probably Dr Heberden. See Bibliography, no. 17.
* ↑ Penny Cyclopedia (1835), Vol. iv. pp. 407, 408, s.v. Bills of Mortality.
* ↑ Pp. 361—362.
* ↑ P. 361.
* ↑ P. 461.
* ↑ Maitland, Hist, of London, ii. 740—743; Ogle, loc. cit. 446; Short, New Observations, p. x. Petty says (p. 511) that in 1685 there were buried from St Bartholomew's and St Thomas's alone 451 persons, which is over two per cent, of the 23,222 burials returned in the annual bill for that year (p. 517 note). In 1729, when the bills returned 29,722 deaths, Maitland finds that 3038 were omitted.
* ↑ Ogle, 443—445.
* ↑ Collection of Yearly Bills, 5; Maitland, ii. 742; Ogle, 447—448.
* ↑ P. 400.