On Wednesday August 30, 1665, the diarist Samuel Pepys ran into his parish clerk and asked how the plague was progressing within their parish. To his dismay, the clerk “told me it encreases much, and much in our parish.” Worst of all, the clerk admitted that the plague was so bad that he had falsified his weekly reports of parish plague deaths: “for, says he, there died nine this week, though I have returned but six.” Whether or not Pepys castigated the parish clerk in person, he recorded his condemnation of such “a very ill practice” in his diary. The numbers within the bills of mortality were a vital public health guide during plague outbreaks and it was imperative for them to be as accurate as possible.

No matter how diligent—or not—the parish clerks of London might be, there were practical limits to their attempts to collect comprehensive mortality statistics for their parish. Vagrants and travelers might slip through the cracks of the parish surveillance network, although any who left a body to be buried at the parish’s expense would be recorded. There was also the possibility of deaths being left unrecorded because there was no body to bury, although the bills were also full of bodies dragged out from the Thames or infants whose bodies were secretly disposed of and later discovered. But the most consistent and identifiable group of people who were not included in the bills of mortality were the men and women who deliberately placed themselves outside the structures of the Church of England: Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters or Non-Conformists. Indeed, the decreasing universality of worship within the Church of England was what eventually led to the bills of mortality being superseded by more comprehensive, secular mortality statistics.

When the printed bills first began in 1603, neither Roman Catholicism nor other Protestant faiths were much of a problem for the Church of England. Admittedly, “papists” were generally seen as a sociopolitical and religious threat—the 1605 Gunpowder Plot left a particularly enduring anti-Catholic mark on popular culture—but their overall number as a percent of the population was low. A 1603 survey of the variously 613 or 623 parishes Diocese of London (which includes but is not limited to the parishes in and around the city of London) indicated that there were only around 300 “recusants” who abstained from worship in the Church of England. An overwhelming 99.8% of the population within the geographical bounds of the diocese worshiped within and took communion at their parish church.¹ This doesn’t mean they were all upstanding members of the Church of England. Many were likely “church papists” and other types of Protestants who occasionally conformed at their parish church but whose spiritual loyalty lay elsewhere. But regardless of their personal beliefs, their outward actions kept them engaged enough with their parish church and parish clerks that their deaths would have been included within their parish’s weekly burial count.

By 1676, the situation had changed dramatically. The intervening decades had seen the theological splintering of the Church of England, a series of civil wars, proliferating religious sects, theological repression, and failed attempts at toleration. The most recent Declaration of Indulgence, issued by King Charles II in 1672, was the latest in a series of back-and-forth legislation arguing over the legal status of, and secular penalties that would be applied to, Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters or Non-Conformists. The 1676 Compton Census was an immense undertaking that attempted to quantify the level of dissent actually present in England. Like the 1603 survey, it made no attempt to count how many people subscribed to specific church doctrines like transubstantiation, but rather how many people existed within vs. wholly outside the social and religious structures of parish life.

Anyone interested in learning more about the Compton Census, its data, and its limitations, should pick up a copy of Anne Whiteman’s The Compton Census of 1676. Long story short: like all data, it has some problems, but at a high level it seems to be a reasonably accurate representation of the over-aged-16 population. The number of children in each faith was likely proportional to the number of adults, as children generally follow their parents’ faith, especially at a young age. Overall, then, a mere 1 out of 178 people was Roman Catholic and a slightly larger 1 out of 22 were dissenters, but the vast majority of the population—a full 95%—was still worshiping at their parish church within the Church of England.²

London, however, was not and is not representative of England as a whole. It is well-known in the historiography that Catholicism in the post-Restoration royal court led to high levels of interaction with Catholicism in and around London, while levels of dissent were higher in London than in the rest of the kingdom. This would have absolutely had an impact on the comprehensiveness of the bills of mortality. But how much higher were these levels of religious nonconformity and how big were their impact? Well, thanks to Anne Whiteman’s painstaking work on the Compton Census, there’s an answer to that: London was 0.33% Roman Catholic and 7.58% non-conforming Protestants. Or flipped around: 92% of the population still worshiped and was recorded through the parochial infrastructure of the Church of England.

Even at that level, however, summary statistics conceal a wealth of information that can be gleaned by looking at the data on a parish-by-parish level. The massive suburban parish of St. Giles Cripplegate—population almost 25,000—contained an equally massive population of non-conforming Protestants and had the lowest conformity rate of all the parishes at 66.76%. That wasn’t much worse than St. Christopher’s 67.69%, but the clerk of St. Christopher had a mere 260 parishioners to keep track of and thus was much more likely to notice when one of them died, even if he didn’t have to bury them. The massive parishes of St. Olave Southwark, St. Martin in the Fields, and St. Mary Magdalen Bermondsy might not have as large a dissenting population as St. Giles Cripplegate (93.75%, 97.39%, and 97.88% conforming respectively) but their data collection problems probably bore a closer relationship to St. Giles Cripplegate’s than to other highly conforming but smaller parishes. It was much easier for a few bodies—or even a few dozen bodies—to slip through the cracks when the overworked clerks were dealing with hundreds of bodies a week. The clerks of St. Benet Sherhog and All Hallows Honey Lane, with their populations of a mere 59 and 50 parishioners, were much less likely to miss when someone died in their parishes, regardless of that person’s religious inclinations.

This blog post is more a first word than a final word on the question of how well the bills of mortality reflected the actual population of seventeenth-century London, but there are three main points to take away:

1. Levels of conformity were nearly universal in 1603 and still extremely high even in the late 17th century, with an average of 92% across London’s population being encompassed by the parochial infrastructure that produced the bills; if we exclude St. Giles Cripplegate, the rate is an even higher 96.4%.
2. While the data from the bills of mortality are not and could never have been perfect, they constitute a sample size of circa 9/10ths of the burials in London which is good enough for statistical analysis; it is unlikely that Roman Catholics or non-conforming Protestants were more or less vulnerable to specific causes of death than Church of England Protestants living in the same geographical spaces and under the same socioeconomic conditions.
3. Massive disparities in the size of the parishes likely had as much to do with problems in the data as religious dissent, due to the greater difficulties of tracking thousands vs. dozens of parishoners; both factors should be considered when examining gaps in the data and breakdowns of the data collection apparatus in the early 18th century bills of mortality.

Table of Religious Conformity by Parish in 1676

Abstracted from Anne Whiteman’s The Compton Census of 1676.

NB: Some bill of mortality parishes are not listed because their counts are included with another parish, while others are genuinely missing data. For more on the gaps in the Compton Census data, see the “Introduction” in Whiteman, especially pages xlvi-xlvii.

Citations

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1665/08/30/

Anne Whiteman, ed. The Compton Census of 1676: A Critical Edition (London: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1986).