Definition
A bill of mortality is an official written record stating the number of deaths occurring within a defined geographic district during a specified period of time. In some jurisdictions and historical periods, births were included alongside deaths.
The term carries two distinct but related meanings:
1. The document itself: A periodic official account of deaths (and sometimes births) compiled for a given locality or administrative district.
2. The district: The geographic area covered by and subject to such official recordkeeping obligations — particularly in the London context, where "within the bills of mortality" became a recognized legal and administrative designation describing the metropolitan area covered by the London parish death registers.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An official statement of the number of deaths in a place or district within a given time; also, a district required to be covered by such a statement.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A weekly account of the deaths occurring in a place, specifying the number that died of each disease; also, the district or territory within which such bills were formerly kept.
In ordinary historical English, the term was well understood and largely consistent with its legal usage. The editorial gap worth noting for legal researchers is the second, geographic meaning — "a district within the bills of mortality" — which appears in legal instruments, statutes, and contracts as a jurisdictional or locational qualifier, not merely a reference to the document itself. A reader unfamiliar with this usage may misread the term as referring only to a record rather than to the territorial unit it defines.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term most often in two distinct contexts, and conflating them produces errors.
First, in early public health and vital statistics law, bills of mortality are the documentary predecessors of modern vital records systems. English statutes and local regulations governing burial, plague response, and later poor law administration frequently reference these records or the obligations of parishes to compile them. American colonial and early republic materials occasionally adopt the terminology in analogous local contexts.
Second, and more commonly in legal instruments, "within the bills of mortality" functions as a geographic term of art in English law — appearing in leases, insurance policies, bond conditions, statutory definitions of domicile, and commercial contracts to mean, in effect, metropolitan London. When researching English legal materials from roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, encountering this phrase in a document does not signal a discussion of public health; it signals a locational limitation or qualification.
The shift from document to district is the primary trap in historical sources. A researcher scanning older legal instruments for "bill" or "bills" may not immediately recognize the territorial usage. Bouvier's entry — drawing on Abbott's dictionary — is the most useful of the three historical sources for flagging this dual role.
Note also the temporal arc: by the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase was increasingly displaced in English law by more precise administrative designations as metropolitan governance was rationalized. American legal materials rarely use "bills of mortality" as a geographic term; the phrase in American sources almost always refers to the document or record type.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's definitions are nearly identical and capture the documentary meaning accurately but incompletely: both describe a written account of deaths in a district over time, with Black's noting the occasional inclusion of births. Neither source addresses the geographic-district meaning.
Bouvier's is the most substantive of the three. It correctly identifies the London plague registrations at the commencement of the seventeenth century as the origin point of the systematic practice and explicitly acknowledges both meanings — the records and the district. The citation to Abbott (presumably Abbott's Law Dictionary) for the secondary meaning is a useful pointer to further historical authority.
None of the three historical dictionaries situates the term within the broader development of vital statistics law or addresses its use as a contractual and statutory locational qualifier in any depth. Researchers relying solely on these entries risk underestimating the term's legal significance in English property, insurance, and administrative materials.
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Jurisdictional Note
The geographic meaning — "within the bills of mortality" as a territorial designation — is an English law phenomenon with little American parallel. In American legal research, the term functions almost exclusively as a reference to death records or their administrative precursors. Modern American vital statistics law uses entirely different terminology derived from state registration statutes.
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