Archive for January, 2012

Boys will be boys as they venture onto thin ice

Posted in Accident, Bills of Mortality, Newspapers with tags , , on 29/01/2012 by Craig Spence

As reported by the London Bills of Mortality for the week of 31st January 1721:

1 found dead at St Margaret Westminster
1 hanged himself being distracted at St Andrew Holborn
2 drowned in a pond by the breaking of the ice at St Leonard Shoreditch
1 killed with a sword at St Brides Fleet Street and buried at St Anne Blackfriars

The Bills report the deaths of two drowned in a pond in the semi-rural parish of St Leonard Shoreditch, clearly the weather was wintery as the two in question died after the ice they were on broke plunging them into the freezing water. The register of St Stephen Coleman Street records one of these deaths when it noted the burial on 6 February 1721 of ‘Aron Peter drowned in a pond of water by the sudden breaking of the ice where on he was sliding.’

Contemporary newspapers, such as  Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal and the Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, support the Bills of Mortality by making it clear that Aron did not die alone. The newspapers report ‘two boys, whose parents lives in Swan Alley, Coleman Street’ … ‘were drowned in the pond behind the Haberdashers Alms-House, the ice breaking under them as they were sliding on it’. With only one burial noted in the parish register of St Stephen Coleman Street it suggests that these boys were more likely friends and neighbours rather than brothers.

Leave a comment »

This week in 1672

Posted in Accident, Bills of Mortality with tags , , , on 22/01/2012 by Craig Spence

As reported by the London Bills of Mortality for the week of 23rd January 1672:

2 killed; one at St Martinin the Fields, one at St Margaret Westminster;
1 by excessive drinking at St Olave Southwark;
1 broken leg;
A women burnt being drunk in St Paul Shadwell;
1 by a fall from a scaffold in St Giles without Cripplegate;
1 burnt at St Paul Covent Garden.

This account of sudden death from London’s teeming streets in 1672 is actually fairly typical. The use of the term ‘killed’ within the Bills of Mortality is not particularly helpful in describing the actual cause of death but a wider reading of the records suggest the use of this phrase was most often associated with those accidentally killed during casual violence; in other words various forms of manslaughter.

As for the role of alcohol as an agent of death the specific noting of those who died by ‘excessive drinking’ clearly had moralising overtones. Noting the drunken state of the woman who (in all probability) fell into the fire in the riverside parish of Shadwell perhaps represents a more direct attempt to evoke a salutary lesson while warning of the evils of drink.

 

Leave a comment »

Death by New River water – should have drunk beer, or maybe he did!

Posted in Accident, Bills of Mortality, Inquest with tags on 16/01/2012 by Craig Spence

On 15 January 1661 the Bills of Mortality reported the death of a man drowned at St John Clerkenwell. The parish burial register for that date provides a little more information noting that the man was a stranger and had drowned in the New River, or its reservoir, near to the Waterhouse in Islington (see Hollar’s excellent depiction below). It also notes that Mr Evans,  the Middlesex coroner, called an inquest on the body and then granted a warrant for burial. While drowning was the most frequent form of sudden violent death in early modern London the majority of these deaths took place in the River Thames. London’s lesser watercourses and smaller land-locked bodies of water did however contribute to the general toll; in fact between 1655-1735 at least eighty-three people drowned in the New River. How this particular individual came to be in the water is not known but it seems that the inquest jury decided this was neither a case of murder nor suicide, so perhaps a drunken stumble into the cold clean water of the New River was all that was needed. For more info on the New River Company see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(England).

 An engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar of the reservoir and Waterhouse of the New River Company in 1665 (just four years after the unknown man was drowned).

Leave a comment »

This week in 1655

Posted in Accident, Bills of Mortality, Murder, Uncategorized with tags , , , , on 07/01/2012 by Craig Spence

As reported by the London weekly Bills of Mortality for the week of 2nd January 1655:

1 Drowned at St Katherine by the Tower;
1 killed by a bull at St Saviours Southwark;
murdered – an infant found in the street at St John the Evangelist;
1 scalded to death in a brewer’s kettle at St Botolph Bishopsgate;
1 slain at St Andrew Holborn.

Clearly the most notable of these fatalities are the persons killed by a bull and scalded in a brewer’s kettle. The bull incident was actually quite a rare occurrence; during the period 1654 to 1735 only twenty-two people were killed by cattle within the area of the Bills. Given that somewhere in the region of 90,000 live cattle passed through the London markets each year during this period the death toll seems relatively light considering the number of workers and passersby who might have been exposed to the animals. Perhaps people were careful to stay out of their way – most of the time? The brewing fatality was however a relatively more common incident, the heady mix of alcohol, boiling liquids and industrial processes actually resulted in the small number of brewery workers being exposed to a higher risk of fatal accident than many other metropolitan occupations.

1 Comment »