Thanks largely to the work of Tony Wrigley and colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Stru

Urban centres exerted a powerful influence on mortality trends in early modern England. The high mortality rates of urban areas created a constant need for new immigrants, drawn from rural populations, and the size and trading functions of towns meant that they functioned as periodic sources of epidemic diseases among the non-urban majority of the population. It is possible that much of the rise and fall of mortality at the national level over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflects the waxing and waning of mortality in urban centres. However our understanding of this process remains very limited, due to the difficulties of working with historical urban sources. As a counterweight to these problems, the Bills of Mortality produced by many towns and cities provide information not available for other sectors of the population, and the individual-level records that underlie the Bills compilations provide extraordinary insights into epidemiological processes in this key period of urban demography. This paper will illustrate the potential of these sources using evidence of smallpox burials from the large London parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the collegiate church of Manchester. English mortality patterns 1541-1850. Thanks largely to the work of Tony Wrigley and colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, we now have a fairly clear picture of mortality trends in England over the course of the last half millenium. Historically favourable levels of life expectancy prevailed in sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, punctuated by subsistence and epidemic crises and especially by soaring mortality rates during plague outbreaks. From the mid-sixteenth century the amplitude of these crises diminished, and plague disappeared after the 1660s. However as mortality fluctuations dampened, the average level of mortality actually rose. Life expectancy was lowest in the early eighteenth century before recovering to sixteenth century levels by 1 This work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Wellcome Trust: see http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/ for details of the projects. 2 Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Dept of Geography, Downing Place, Cambridge, CB2 3EN 3 Professor of Urban History, University of Newcastle.