What Londoners died of in the 1600s

For Londoners in the 1600s, life wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Although, coincidentally, it was during this century that Hyde Park and St James’s Park opened to the public.

Death came under different names. Among the biggest categories in the surviving Bills of Mortality were consumption, plague, ague, griping in the guts, convulsion and chrisomes. Consumption and tissick usually described chronic chest disease, often tuberculosis. Ague was a recurring fever, often malaria. Griping in the guts described severe stomach and intestinal illness, while chrisomes were babies who died in their first month of life.

Plague behaves differently from almost everything else on the chart. It explodes during epidemic years and then almost disappears, before returning in another outbreak. In 1665 it overwhelms the other causes, but in many surviving bills there are few or no plague deaths at all.

Some entries sound almost alien now. Dropsy meant swelling caused by fluid accumulating in the body. Bloody flux was dysentery. Imposthume was an abscess. Rising of the lights referred to breathing problems involving the lungs or airways: lights was an old word for lungs. And teeth really did appear as a cause of death, probably for infants who died while teething.

And these are only the categories that fit on the chart. Another 126 cause families are grouped here as other causes. They include people who were drowned, executed, murdered, bitten by a mad dog, killed in accidents or described as dying from French pox (syphilis), King’s Evil (a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes), grief, or simply being found dead in the street.

Data and methodology: Annual Guildhall Bills of Mortality from Death by Numbers, 1629–1685. The 20 named cause families cover 93% of recorded deaths; the remaining 126 are grouped as Other causes. A black cell means 0 recorded burials; No data marks years without an annual bill.

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