Edited by Paul Laxton

`The key to the social history of London is to be found in its changes of population.'
Dorothy George

The devastating epidemics of bubonic plague and other diseases in the sixteenth century led the Corporation of London to order that the number dying in each parish should be recorded. By the eighteenth century weekly and annual bills of mortality were being printed for more general circulation continuing in an unbroken series into the first half of the nineteenth century. As well as numbers buried the bills record causes of death, the number dying of plague, the age groups of those buried as well as the numbers christened.

The surviving bills for the period 1701 to 1829 have been brought together for the first time and reproduced on microfiche, providing historians, social statisticians and demographers with the fullest series of vital statistics for the 18th to 19th century for any city in the world.