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[1]; 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[2] 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[3], 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[4] 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[5]. 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
