obscurity. Graunt implies[1] that for the figures before 1629 he was forced to have recourse to the unpublished records in the Parish Clerks Hall, and Dr Ogle suggests[2] that the earlier figures preserved by Stow may have been obtained by that antiquary in a similar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 In 1849 they ceased, being practically superseded by the new bills issued, since 1840, under the authority of the Registrar-General.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 iiixx 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[3] In 1595 the bills gave returns, it is said[4], for one hundred and nine parishes arranged alphabetically without distinction of locality[5]. 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[6], 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
- ↑ 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.).
