Graunt's Observations

1662 · Bills of Mortality · Work 681 of 1,871

Graunt's Observations, 1662, Bills of Mortality

A slim quarto book of 1662 on the oak table of a cloth merchant's counting house in London, the book eighteen centimetres tall, bound in plain brown calfskin with raised bands on a bare spine, lying closed, from its back a large folded table half opened and hanging over the table edge at a flat angle, its surface a grid of fine ruled lines soft in focus, beside the book a thick pile of single weekly sheets tied with coarse string, their faces a grey texture, two hands in dark woollen cuffs with plain linen bands resting on the pile, a pewter inkwell, a quill, a brass candlestick, bolts of dyed cloth stacked in soft focus behind, daylight from small leaded panes on the left.

What it was used for
John Graunt was a London tradesman who counted up the weekly Bills of Mortality and published his Observations on them in 1662. These lists were compiled at the Parish Clerks' Hall and gave burials, christenings and causes of death; they were handed in on Tuesdays, printed on Wednesdays and distributed on Thursdays. A continuous run begins on 29 December 1603. Graunt used the Bills up to about 1660; his comparison of burials and christenings rested on the forty years from 1603 to 1644. From them he computed things the lists were never meant for: a London population of some 384,000 in the parishes counted and about 460,000 including the suburbs, a sex ratio of 14 males to 13 females in London and 15 to 14 in the country, and plague deaths of 35,417 in 1625 and 10,400 in 1636. He suspected that a quarter more plague deaths occurred than were reported.
What was new
What was new was that lists kept as a plague warning yielded ratios and a table of survivors by age: of 100 quick conceptions, as Graunt counts them, about 36 die before the age of six. How he got there is unclear, and the best source says so itself. In his foreword to the reprint in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, B. Benjamin writes that we do not know how Graunt obtained his multiplier of five-eighths, and calls the life table defective. Even the authorship is disputed: in his 1899 edition of William Petty's writings, Charles Henry Hull assigns the Observations to Graunt only with the qualification more probably. The barb lies in the data themselves. The causes of death came from the searchers, in Graunt's words ancient matrons sworn to their office, who after a cup of ale and a two-groat fee instead of one could no longer tell the pox from consumption. Yet Graunt expressly held their ignorance to be no impediment to keeping sufficient and useful accounts.

What the sources leave open: The figures come from the reprint of the Observations with B. Benjamin's foreword in the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries; the first edition of 1662 was not consulted, and the English phrases are paraphrased, not quoted verbatim. The judgement defective and the statement about the unknown multiplier stand in Benjamin's foreword, not in Graunt. The story that Charles II recommended Graunt to the Royal Society could not be verified.

Further reading