2 - ‘I told my Neighbours, who sent for the Searchers’: From Personal Trauma to Public Knowledge

Summary

There is much pleasure in deducing so many abstruse, and unexpected inferences out of these poor despised Bills of Mortality; … there is pleasure in doing something new.

John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations (1662)

Death and burial were of central interest to early modern society and, as it developed, the early modern state. From a theological perspective the focus upon death – especially in the wake of first the Reformation denial of purgatory and later the development of predestination as an article of Puritan faith – led many to enquire after the manner of a good and wholesome death. The development of state bureaucracy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries similarly drew the attention of administrators and others to the frequency, occurrence and character of death among the population at large. In particular, tracking the incidence and progress of plague epidemics occupied the thoughts and actions of many. At the end of the seventeenth century, with plague waning as a present concern, attention instead turned to issues of demography and the suitability of the population for the maintenance of commercial and military endeavour; in other words, to the realm of ‘political arithmetic’.

Whatever the formal or cultural interest in death in its causes and magnitude, specific administrative actions during the early modern period routinely failed to address and hence to record the finer narrative detail associated with the majority of deaths. In addition, attention was normally focused not on the moment of death but, rather, on the act of burial. As a result the vast majority of burial register entries fail to elaborate beyond a simple statement of identity and date of interment; yet sudden violent deaths, those that resulted from murder, suicide or accident, were of perennial social and cultural interest to the communities within which they occurred. Consequently a considerable measure of official and communal effort was exercised to elaborate and record the circumstances of those particular fatalities. It is easy to comprehend how participation in such processes promoted the continuance of orderly life in the face of what was generally construed as a disorderly death. And, no doubt, a broader communal engagement in such activity helped to restore and maintain social norms; from an anthropological perspective, abnormal deaths required both transparent explanation and, where appropriate, purificatory ‘punishment’.