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Research note

Yet Another Inquiry into the Trustworthiness of

Eighteenth-century Bills of Mortality: The Newcastle and

Gateshead Bills, 1736-1840

Graham Butler

Abstract

This note is a preliminary analysis of the Newcastle and Gateshead Bills of Mortality, a hitherto unused source for understanding some of the most significant aspects of vital registration and burial practices in the North East’s capital, c. 1736-1840. The Bills are annual totals of the number of burials and baptisms which took place in all of the ancient Anglican parishes in Newcastle and Gateshead. One of the most lucid aspects of the Bills is that they recorded the number of burials which took place in the ‘infamous’ un-consecrated burial ground of Ballast Hills located on the outskirts of the east-end of the town. Attention here is given to the initial accuracy of the Bills by focussing upon All Saints parish in Newcastle which accounted for approximately 50 per cent of the town’s total population over the entire period. Here the data revealed in the Bills are compared directly with the burials which were registered by the parish clerk in All Saints. The major finding of this preliminary study is the huge discrepancy between the number of reported burials and the number of baptisms which took place in All Saints over time. The Bills also provide a fully documented account of the impact of Ballast Hills and the apparent “export in corpses” which was clearly taking place on a large scale. By the 1770s-1790s, this one burial ground alone, was consuming roughly 60-70 per cent of the town’s dead population. The reasons behind this phenomenon are discussed by looking specifically at the possible impact of religious dissent, burial costs and burial space in the town. The note concludes that while this preliminary analysis is revealing, more work needs to be done which would involve a fuller analysis of all of the parishes recorded in the Bills as well as looking more closely at the registration of baptisms, stillbirths and the heavy “traffic in corpses” which was clearly a major defect of vital registration in Georgian Newcastle.

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The Bills of Mortality compiled in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-

centuries have received a great of attention from historians, historical

demographers and social historians of medicine for the past three hundred years.

The majority of scholarly attention has been paid to the London Bills. Although

heavily criticised by Victorian scholars, historians and demographers writing in the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been generally somewhat more optimistic

about the usefulness and accuracy of the London Bills.1 John Landers for instance

has stated in his pioneering study Death and the Metropolis that ‘The Bills possess

both advantages and disadvantages… their principal advantage is one of scale

since they purport to document the capital as a whole in a single set of

tabulations’.2 Leonard Schwarz has also defended the Bills stressing ‘London was

fortunate in having Bills of Mortality – official but highly inaccurate statistics of

births and deaths in the central area of the metropolis’.3 Bob Woods commented

on the London Bills in an article published in this journal and noted that ‘Bills of

Mortality offer a tantalising challenge to historical demographers’.4 More recently

Jeremy Boulton and Leonard Schwarz have examined the London Bills as part of

their ongoing Pauperlives project based on a mass of archival material for the large

Westminster parish of St Martin-in–the-fields.5 Their study concluded, amongst

with other things, that ‘the bills… remain the most comprehensive statistics of

baptisms and burials that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ever produced’.6

Despite the recent resurrection of the London Bills, there is still a very little known

1 For the nineteenth-century pessimism see: W. Ogle, ‘An Inquiry into the Trustworthiness of the Old Bills of Mortality’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 55 (1892), p. 451: ‘it is then abundantly clear that … these imperfect records of burials supply no trustworthy basis for a comparison between the past and present mortality in London’. For two studies which defended the Bills see: L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 125; J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670-1830 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 91-93. For a major exception to the accuracy of the London Bills see: P. Razzell, ‘Infant Mortality in London, 1538-1850: a methodological study’, Local Population Studies (hereafter LPS), 87 (2011), pp. 64, 45-64: ‘a review of evidence on the London bills of mortality and parish registers indicates that there were major registration problems throughout the whole period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries’. 2 Landers, Death and the Metropolis, p. 91. 3 Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, p. 125. 4 Robert Woods, ‘Mortality in Eighteenth-century London: a New Look at the Bills of Mortality’, LPS, 77 (2006), p. 12. 5 http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/ [accessed 12/10/2011]. 6 J. Boulton and L. Schwarz, ‘Yet Another Inquiry in the Trustworthiness of Eighteenth-century London’s Bills of Mortality’, LPS, 85 (2010), p. 28.

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about eighteenth-century Bills of Mortality which were compiled outside of the

metropolis, principally in the provincial towns and cities of England. The only

exceptions to this are Sutton’s work on Carlisle published in the late nineteenth-

century, Armstrong’s work published in 1983 again relating to the Carlisle Bills and

finally Powell’s work on the eighteenth-century Northampton Bills.7

This article examines the Bills of Mortality which were compiled in the

towns of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Gateshead in north-east England over the

course of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth-century. It aims to

answer the following set of questions. How accurate are the Bills of Morality with

regard to the number burials they document over time? What do the Bills reveal

about burial practices and vital registration in the town? And lastly, to what extent

can historians and demographers use the Bills as a guide to the overall number of

burials which were carried out in a large urban centre? Throughout the process of

asking and answering these sorts of questions this article should provide an

unusually documented account of a hitherto neglected source for understanding

some of the most important aspects of the demographic history of the town.

What are the Newcastle and Gateshead Bills of Mortality?

Literally nothing is known of the origin of the Newcastle Bills of Mortality. Indeed,

the only documented reference to their existence is in a small collection of the Bills

held in the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums collections.8 Because of this it

seems logical to provide a brief overview of what the Bills actually consist of and

record. The overall information has been laid out in Table 1. The longest running

documented parishes recorded in the Bills are the ancient parishes in Newcastle

7 W. Sutton, ‘On the Method used by Milne in the Construction of the Carlisle Table of Mortality’, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, 24 (1883), pp. 110-29; W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Trend of Mortality in Carlisle between the 1780s and 1840s: a Demographic Contribution to the Standard of Living Debate’, Economic History Review, 34 (1981), pp. 94-114; D. Powel, ‘William Cowper and the Northampton Bills of Mortality’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, 5 (1973), pp. 19-32. 8 The reference for the small collection of the Bills in Tyne and Wear Archives and Museum (TWAM) collection is TWAM, CE.BA/14.

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(All Saints, St Nicholas, St John’s and St Andrew’s) which have burial and

baptismal data running for well over an entire century from 1736-1849.

[Table 1: Data contained in the Bills of Mortality 1736-1849 – about here]

The Newcastle and Gateshead Bills of Mortality differ from those compiled

in the metropolis, firstly in format. The Newcastle Bills, unlike those of London,

Carlisle and Northampton were not published in any voluminous collection which

makes their accessibility more complex and particularly time consuming.9 The

Newcastle Bills were published annually in the local press, namely in first editions

of the Newcastle Courant Newspaper (founded in 1711), from 1736-1797. They

stopped being published in the Courant in 1798 and moved to the Newcastle

Advertiser from 1798 until 1815 when they returned to the Courant. The reasons

why these moves took place are unknown.10 The Bills contain information on the

annual number of burials and baptism that took place in the Anglican parishes in

Newcastle and Gateshead and later of those burials that took place in the newly

developed cemeteries which sprouted in the nineteenth-century. From 1776 the

Bills also provide estimates of the total number of burials that took place in Ballast

Hills burial ground outside of the east walls of the town.

Newcastle and Gateshead: Size of Population

Before going on to examine the Bills in depth, it seems appropriate to briefly

discuss the size of the area which the Bills cover and the individual population

sizes of the parishes which are recorded in the Bills. It is however extremely

difficult to gain any accurate impression of the population of Newcastle or

Gateshead prior to the publication of the first national census in 1801, although

earlier estimates have been made, they provide no data for their estimations.11 We

9 Most of the London Bills data exploited by historians came from Marshal’s study, see: J. Marshal, Mortality in the Metropolis (London, 1832), p. 81. This latter point probably helps explain why these sources have been virtually ignored by historians and demographers because they are not as easily accessible as others have proven to be. 10 For a full discussion of the Bills, see: G.A. Butler, ‘Disease, Medicine and the Urban Poor in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, c.1750-1850’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Newcastle University, 2012), pp. 22-26. 11 M. Barke, ‘The People of Newcastle: a Demographic History’, in R. Coll and B. Lancaster (eds), Newcastle-upon-Tyne: a Modern History (Chichester, 2001), p. 136.

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will begin by looking at the results of the censuses. Table 2 gives the population

totals revealed in the nineteenth-century censuses. These totals have been divided

by parish and the proportion of the population in each parish has been calculated

in terms of their percentage share of Tyneside’s (Newcastle and Gateshead)

population. During the nineteenth century the population of Tyneside was

dominated by the parish of All Saints in the city’s east-end accounting for around

something between 30-40 per cent of the total population. The significance of All

Saints population in Table 1 is lower than it would be if Gateshead was not

included in the total. Removing the Gateshead census figure suggests that All

Saints accounted for an astounding 50 per cent of Newcastle’s population over the

course of the first half of the nineteenth century. St Andrew’s parish experienced

considerable growth over the course of the nineteenth century; this was partly due

to the expansion of the parish boundaries which took place in the 1830s when part

of the town’s ancient wall was removed and the west-end of Newcastle began to

become more populated.12 It is also clear that over the course of the whole of the

nineteenth century the population of St Nicholas and St John’s parish diminishes

rapidly after approximately 1851. Gateshead’s population growth is also

considerable, accounting for approximately 23 per cent of Tyneside in 1801 to

around 60 per cent by the end of the nineteenth century. We shall return to these

parish population sizes later as they will reveal some important aspects with

relation to the Bills of Mortality and the chosen burial location of the town’s

residents.

[Table 2: The Population of Newcastle and Gateshead by Parish and

Percentage Distribution, 1801-1901 – about here]

How was Tyneside’s population distributed in the eighteenth century? The

only way in which one can gain an impression of this is if we examine the number

of baptisms which took place within the Anglican churches on Tyneside over time.

12 For discussion of the growth of these parishes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see: Butler, ‘Disease, Medicine and the Urban Poor’, pp. 12-59.

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Figure 1 sets these out in the form of a stacked bar chart and is highly suggestive.

Clearly All Saints still made up a major proportion of the total population of

eighteenth-century Tyneside and that this clearly continued well into the nineteenth

century. The graph also suggests that the percentage share of the population of the

other parishes was relatively close to what it would be during the first fifty years or

so of the nineteenth century. Thus we now know that the population of Tyneside

was dominated by the parish of All Saints and that over time the other parishes in

both Table 1 and Figure 1 had similar population distributions. This will be

important to remember when the number of burials which were recorded in the

Bills of Mortality is examined below. It is to this important aspect of the Bills that

we must now turn.

[Figure 1: Distribution of Baptisms on Tyneside, 1739-1838 – about here]

How Accurate are the Bills of Mortality?13

In order to understand whether or not the Bills of Mortality are accurate in terms

of the number of burials they purport to document, they need to be compared

directly with the parish registers for the four main parishes in the town. Since we

have already established that All Saints parish was the largest parish in the town it

seems reasonable to begin this preliminary study by looking at the number of

burials which were recorded in the Bills of Mortality to those which were registered

in this register (Figure 2).

[Figure 2: Annual Total of Burials Recorded in All Saints Parish Burial

Register and those Recorded in the Bills of Mortality, 1736-1830 – about

here]

It is clear that the overall number of burials which were recorded in the Bills

of Mortality were remarkably close to those which were registered within the

parish burial register in All Saints. What is also interesting is that in this large parish

13 This is only a preliminary analysis of the Bills and their accuracy, a longer piece will appear shortly which will examine not only burial registration but also baptisms, burial cost, religious dissent, ‘stillbirths’ and other aspects of vital registration on Tyneside.

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we see that the number of burials both in the Bills and in the register appear to be

falling over the course of the eighteenth and first two decades of the nineteenth

century. While it appears that the burials recorded in the Bills draw a close parallel

to those registered by the parish clerk, it is also clearly the case that in some years

there are differences. In order to examine these further it is instructive to plot the

number of burials recorded in the Bills as a percentage of the burials reported in

the parish register over time. Thus Figure 3 has been plotted, along with a five-year

moving average, to show the resulting trend over time.

[Figure 3: All Saints Parish Burials in the Bills of Mortality as a Percentage

of the Burials Recorded in the Parish Register and 5-year moving average,

1736-1830 – about here]

Clearly, from around 1736 until the 1770s the Bills closely reflect the

number of burials which were registered by the clerk. On average between 1736

and 1770 the Bills record 99.4 per cent of the burials which were recorded by the

parish clerk in the burial register of the parish. However between 1771 and 1830

the Bills overinflate the number of burials on average by 0.7 per cent. Why was

this? This may have a simple explanation. Since the Bills were published within

local newspapers which often took place in different issues and different months

there is every chance that an annual total published in say March 1801 for the

preceding year i.e. 1800 may contain a count of burials from January and February

1801 within the total, which would help explain the surplus of burials in some

years and the deficit in others. What is more important here is that the overall

number of burials recorded in the Bills corresponds remarkably to the overall

number of burials recorded in the parish register, which suggest that through

chance the burials in the bills just about even out. For example, the overall number

of burials which are recorded in the parish registers (excluding 1815 from the total

as no Bill of Mortality seems to exist for that year) was 16,691 and the total of

burials recorded in the Bills was 16,465. This means that bills contain 98.6 per cent

of the burials which were recorded in the burial register compiled by the parish

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clerk. Once again this demonstrates, that the number of burials recorded in the

Bills, broadly represent the number of burials (not deaths) which took place in the

parish burial ground.14

Export or ‘traffic’ in Corpses?

Stuart Basten in a recent article published in this journal has already stressed the

interest of Newcastle as a case study for urban demography owing to the fact the

town was ‘home to one of the largest dissenting burial grounds in provincial

England – Ballast Hills – adding further complexity to the chosen location of

burial’.15 The sheer impact of Ballast Hills burial ground on the chosen location of

burial for the Novocastrian population was something which did not escape the

attention of contemporaries, when the first Newcastle census was published in

1801, in the section containing the town’s parish register abstracts a note was

included to help explain the relatively small number of burials when compared

with the number baptisms which had taken place in the eighteenth century. It

noted the following:

It appears that there are a great Number of Meeting-Houses of different

denominations at this place, where the children of the respective

Congregations are chiefly baptised; and that more Burials take Place at the

unconsecrated ground called the Ballast Hills, than at the Church or Chapels

altogether; of the former no register is kept.16

In his history of Newcastle published in 1827 Eneas Mackenzie made some further

important comments about this large unconsecrated burial ground. He wrote:

14 Burials do not represent deaths. For a discussion of this important issue, see: R. Schofield, ‘Traffic in Corpses: Some Evidence from Barming, Kent (1788-1812)’, LPS, 33 (1984), pp. 49-53; J. Boulton, ‘Traffic in Corpses: Interment, Burial Fees and Vital Registration in Georgian London’, Pauper Lives Working Paper: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/ [5 October 2012]: Boulton and Schwarz, ‘Yet Another Inquiry’; S. Basten, ‘Traffic in Corpses: Further Evidence from late Georgian North-east England’, LPS, 88 (2012), pp. 84-88. 15 Basten, ‘Traffic in Corpses’, p. 87. 16 Census of Great Britain, 1801, Abstract of the Answers and Returns, Population Act, 41, King Geo III. (1800), p. 223. https://histpop.org/ [11 November 2011].

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More bodies are interred in this burying-ground than in all the church-

yards in the town; and, in consequence, it has recently been found

inadequate to accommodate the numerous occupants, without

prematurely disturbing the remains of those who had gone before, and

thus distressing the feelings of the living.17

It appears to have been thought that it was the very nature of the Ballast which was

‘dumped’ at this site from ships upon arrival into the port made the soil there

‘peculiarly well adapted for the purposes of sepulture: it is light and dry, while the

calcareous nature of the ballast accelerates the decomposition of the dead’.18 In

the 1780s it was not simply the composition of the soil which was attracting

attention from contemporaries:

At a common council held the fourth day of April, 1785, the inhabitants

of the East Ballast Hills petitioned, setting forth, that numbers of swine

were daily observed working and grubbing among the graves there, near

the petitioners' dwelling houses, to the great annoyance of the

petitioners, and of many others who pass and re-pass that way.19

What impact did Ballast Hills have upon the number of burials which took

place in All Saints over time? One of the most remarkable features of this un-

consecrated burial ground is the huge impact that it had upon burial practices not

only in the town as a whole but particularly in All Saints parish itself. Figure 3

demonstrates this quite lucidly by plotting All Saints burials as a percentage of all

of the burials recorded in the in the Bills of Mortality. The thinking here, as we

have already shown in the evidence from the nineteenth-century censuses and the

evidence from the recorded baptisms in the Bills, is that All Saints accounted for

roughly 40-50 per cent of the town’s total population (based on the proportion of

17 E. Mackenzie, Historical Account of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – Including the Borough of Gateshead (Newcastle, 1827), pp. 370-414. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.

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burials which took place there). One might assume then, in a parish which had

such a sizeable population, they would similarly produce around 40-50 per cent of

the town’s burials per year which would be interred in the All Saints parish burial

ground.

[Figure 4: All Saints Parish Burials and the ‘Ballast Hills effect’, 1736-1830 –

about here]

Figure 4 plots All Saints burials as a proportion of the overall burials which

were recorded in the Bills, and has been aptly termed the ‘Ballast Hills effect’.

Figure 4 is clearly one of two parts. Firstly between 1736 and 1760, the Bills

demonstrate that All Saints burials accounted for roughly 43 per cent of the overall

burials which took place in the town. One can clearly see that the situation changes

dramatically as one moves in the last four decades of the eighteenth and first three

decades of the nineteenth century when on average between 1761 and 1799 All

Saints burials accounted for only 20 per cent of the known recorded burials in the

town and between 1800 and 1830 this proportion fell dramatically again to an

meagre average of only 9 per cent.20 What was going on? Is it possible to use the

evidence in the Bills to add some further knowledge on this aspect of burial

practices in Newcastle?

To understand the sheer impact that Ballast Hills had upon chosen burial

location in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Newcastle is something which

historians and demographers of the town have either never tried to attempt given

the lack of contemporary evidence, or it is something about which they have made

some undocumented speculations.21 We are entirely fortunate that the Bills can

provide some remedy to this since they document the number of burials which

took place at Ballast Hills from the 1770s onwards.22 Ballast Hills burials as a

20 The five-year yearly percentage figures are: 1736-40 = 43.2; 1741-45 = 45.7; 1746-50 = 45.2; 1751-55 = 43.8; 1756-60 = 41.0; 1761-65 = 31.8; 1766-70 = 25.9; 1771-75 = 21.1; 1776-80 = 24.8; 1781-85 = 20.6; 1786-90 = 11.9; 1791-95 = 12.7; 1796-1800 = 9.9; 1801-05 = 11.2; 1806-10 = 11.5; 1811-15 = 9.7; 1816-20 = 6.5; 1821-25 = 7.2; and between 1826-30 = 8.0. 21 S. Middlebrook, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Its Growth and Achievement (Newcastle, 1950); C.M. Law. ‘Some Notes on the Urban Populations of England and Wales in the 18th century’, Local Historian, 10 (1972), pp. 13-26; C.W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: a Study of the Building Process, 1740-1820 (London, 1974). 22 The first reference or count of the Ballast Hills burials in the Bills of Mortality occurred in 1776.

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proportion of all of the burials recorded in the Bills have been plotted graphically

in Figure 5 together with a five-year moving average.

[Figure 5: Ballast Hills Burials as a Proportion of the Total Number of

Newcastle Burials and Five-year moving average, 1776-1848 – about here]

These data demonstrate the huge significance of Ballast Hills as a final

resting place for the town’s population. Over the entire period in which the Ballast

Hills data survive this one site alone accounted for roughly 41 per cent of the total

number of burials which took place in Newcastle (and Gateshead) between 1777

and 1849. The proportion of burials peaked in 1803 when over 86 per cent of the

town’s burials took place in this one site alone. Why was this so? Ballast Hills

seems to have been an attractive place of burial for the town’s population in at

least two ways. Firstly, this northern town seems to have had a reasonable number

of religious dissenters – one of the major defects of parish-register based

demography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries.23 The second relates

to burial fees in the town.24 It was much cheaper to be buried in Ballast Hills than

it was in one of the other burial grounds in the town’s Anglican churchyards.25 By

the 1820s it cost only 6d to inter someone at Ballast Hills which was paid directly

to the Newcastle Corporation, this may have been even less in the previous

century, especially before 1785 when the Ballast Hills site was taken over by

Trustees and an onsite Sexton appointed.26 The impact of cheap interment at

Ballast Hills seems to have caught the attention of the Vicar of All Saints (George

23 See for example: S. Szreter and G. Mooney, ‘Urbanization, Mortality and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates on the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-century British Vities’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998), pp. 84-112; P. Razzell, ‘The Evaluation of Baptism as a Form of Birth Registration through Cross-matching Census and Parish Register Data’, Population Studies, 26 (1972), pp. 121-46. 24 For a very recent and thought-provoking examination of burial fees, amongst other things see: J. Boulton, ‘Saving the Poor Worms from Starving? Traffic in Corpses and the Commodification of Burial in Georgian London’, Continuity and Change (2014), 29, forthcoming. I am grateful to Professor Boulton for allowing me to reference this paper. 25 With reference to Ballast Hills Baillie noted in his important book, J. Baillie, An Impartial History of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne (Newcastle, 1801), p. 276 that in in 1801 it was ‘Principally appropriated to the use of Dissenters’, owing to ‘the expense of interment being lower... the poor of the established church were frequently buried at the site’. It has also been pointed out that not only Newcastle’s working population was interred at this site but also those paupers who had died in one of the town’s workhouses, see: Butler, ‘Disease, Medicine and the Urban Poor’, pp. 267-76. 26 W. Parson and W. White, History, Directory and Gazetteer of the Counties of Durham and Northumberland and the Towns and Counties of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2 vols, Leeds, 1827), I, xxlli.

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Emerson) who upon noting the inconsistency between the number of burials and

the number of baptisms in his church made the following observation in 1802 of

‘the evident disparity between Baptisms and Burials in this Return, but especially

for the last 30 Years’.27 The meagre cost of 6d for burial by eighteenth- and early

nineteenth-century standards was remarkably inexpensive. In eighteenth-century

Bristol for example, according to Mary Fissell it cost 25s for a funeral, a cost which

would have been well beyond the means a poor labourer or his family.28 In the

Westminster parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields the cost of interment for adults was

roughly 168d and for a child aged less than 15 years it was 78d.29 Both the cases in

Bristol and in eighteenth-century Westminster suggest that interment at Ballast

Hills was astoundingly cheap. Further-to-this, Stuart Basten has analysed the cost of

funerals provided by eighteenth and nineteenth-century friendly societies on

Tyneside and suggests that funerals for members of these groups were costly affairs

and were considerably more expensive than the meagre 6d at Ballast Hills.30

There is one last element to the forgoing analysis which should be touched

upon in this preliminary study and this is the size of the Anglican burial grounds in

Newcastle. While by law one could not refuse a person burial in their ‘home’

parish, it is also the case that being buried or at least one’s place of burial, may

have been seen by contemporaries as an emblem of social status or belonging in a

local context at least.31 Given that the end of the eighteenth century is known for

the lack of burial ‘space’ in urban settlements and that the burial grounds in most

of the major parishes in Newcastle were relatively small may also help to explain

27 Mackenzie, Historical Account of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, pp. 320-22. 28 M.E. Fissell, ‘The “Sick and Drooping Poor” in Eighteenth-century Bristol and its Region’, Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989), pp. 35-58. It is worth noting here that the cost of a funeral and a burial may not be identical for example, the cost of a funeral may include a burial fee. 29 Boulton, ‘Traffic in Corpses’. 30 Basten, ‘Registration Practices of Anglican Parishes’, pp. 80-82. Admittedly these costs would have generally been greater given the accompanied food and drink purchases provided by such societies. The market for cheap burials in eighteenth-century London created what one historian has termed, ‘the capitalist economy of the dead’, for reference see, Boulton, ‘Traffic in Corpses’. 31 Boulton, ‘Traffic in Corpses’. See also: K. Snell, ‘Gravestones, Belonging and Local Attachment in England, 1700-2000’, Past and Present, 179 (2003), pp. 97-134.

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why such a huge number of burials took place at Ballast Hills and may also suggest

something more about the cost of being interred in such sites.32

[Table 3: Breakdown of Vital Events in the Bills of Mortality, 1736-1849 –

about here]

In order to come to some fuller analysis Table 3 sets out the overall number

of burials and baptisms which were recorded in the Bills relating to a total close to

a quarter of a million people who were buried or baptised in the town from 1736-

1849. This is a highly instructive exercise which lends weight to the notion that

further research needs to be carried out if one is to ever gain a fully documented

account of vital registration and burials practices in the northern metropolis.

However, for the sake of this article it is instructive to briefly discuss the data in

Table 3. The most crucial and revealing feature here is the huge proportion of

burials which clearly took place at Ballast Hills. Secondly, and perhaps more telling

is the fact that burials in the other parishes (St Andrew’s and St John’s) seem to

have remained fairly stable accounting for roughly 12-13 per cent of the town’s

burials over the period. It is this point which leads one to question whether or not

these parishes were impacted by the apparent ‘export in corpses’, especially since

they both grew considerably in the nineteenth century but were still not returning a

proportionate number of corpses in their burial grounds.33 This would certainly

suggest that it was not simply All Saints which was greatly impacted by the

presence of Ballast Hills as a resting place. It is a question which will require

further research on the ‘traffic and export in corpses’ which was taking place in

eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Newcastle.34

Conclusion

32 Keith Wrightson’s study of seventeenth-century Newcastle has found references to specific areas within the local parish grounds where plague victims wished to buried, see: K. Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, his City and the Plague (Newhaven, 2011), pp. 75-97. 33 Butler, ‘Disease, Medicine and the Urban Poor’, pp. 30-52. 34 Schofield, ‘Traffic in Corpses’, pp. 49-53; Basten, ‘Traffic in Corpses’, pp. 84-88; Boulton, ‘Traffic in Corpses’.

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What has this this single parish-based analysis of the Bills of Mortality shown?

Firstly, the number of burials recorded in the Bills for All Saints broadly

corresponds to the number of burials which were noted by the parish clerk and

which took place in the local burial ground in the parish. However, the number of

reported burials in both the parish registers and the Bills, for All Saints, does not

represent the total number of deaths which took place in the parish in any one year,

and therefore any analysis of mortality in the parish based solely upon the parish

registers or reported deaths in the Bills would be highly flawed.

The most important and somewhat dramatic finding of this preliminary

study is the impact of Ballast Hills. This burial ground ‘consumed’ a surplus of

burials from All Saints and most likely from all of the other parishes in the town

and its immediate vicinity. The data analysed on Ballast Hills certainly add much

weight to Basten’s observations about Newcastle being a particularly interesting

case-study. However, what is clearly needed urgently is a more comprehensive

analysis of all of the parishes in the Bills (and their registers) as well as all of the

other burial grounds which emerged in the nineteenth century.

Lastly, a study of this type probably raises more questions than it answers.

For example, why did Novocastrian’s turn to Ballast Hills to inter their relatives?

What can one say of the social status of those who were buried there? Were they

all poor, and furthermore were their respective relatives? Above all, we surely need

to know more about this important aspect of historical demography (traffic in

corpses) in other localities both urban and rural.35 Lastly, eighteenth-century Bills

of Mortality do not just exist in London, they also exist in the provinces, as has

been shown here and these surely deserve the same attention (if not more) than the

ongoing attention which has been given to those historians who are interested in

the demographic history of England’s metropolis.36

35 Jeremy Boulton and Leonard Schwarz have made a similar plea to the local population historians of England, see: Boulton and Schwarz, ‘Yet Another Inquiry’, p. 45. 36 Further development on the Pauperlives project is also looking at Manchester 1750-1850, headed by Dr Romola Davenport, which is already providing fruitful results, see: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/pauperlives/ [accessed 11/11/2013].

15

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Jeremy Boulton as always, for encouragement on

my work on the Bills of Mortality and for bringing my knowledge on this subject

up-to-date. Also to Dr Stuart Basten who provided me with a copy of his 2008

PhD thesis. I would also like to thank the audience of the LPSS 2012 conference

‘New Research in Local Population Studies’ held at Oxford Brookes University,

especially Dr Chris Galley. I would too like to thank Dr Jonathan Andrews and

Professor Keith Wrightson who both read and gave valuable feedback on earlier

versions of this research and Dr Romola Davenport who runs the Pauperlives

project on Manchester. And lastly, to the LPS editorial board for commenting on

earlier drafts of this research note.

16

Table 1: Data contained in the Bills of Mortality 1736-1849

Period of

coverage

Burials

Baptisms

St Nicholas* 1736-1849 Yes Yes

All Saints* 1736-1849 Yes Yes

St John’s* 1736-1849 Yes Yes

St Andrew’s* 1736-1849 Yes Yes

Gateshead* 1764-1827 Yes Yes

St Ann’s* 1832-1849 Yes Yes

Gateshead St Mary’s* 1828-1849 Yes Yes

Gateshead St John’s* 1828-1849 Yes Yes

St Paul’s* 1845-1849 Yes Yes

St Peter’s* 1845-1849 Yes No

Ballast Hills** 1776-1849 Yes No

Westgate Hill

Cemetery***

1829-1849 Yes No

Jesmond Cemetery *** 1838-1849 Yes No

Friends Cemetery**** 1840-1849 Yes No

New Cemetery***** 1834-1837 Yes No

*Anglican parishes

**Un-consecrated burial ground

***Purpose built cemeteries

****Nonconformist burial ground

*****Unknown

Source: Bills of Mortality.

17

Table 2: The Population of Newcastle and Gateshead by Parish and

Percentage Distribution, 1801-1901

Year

St

Nicholas

St

John's

St

Andrew's

All

Saints

Gates-

head

Total

1801 4,803 4,707 4,460 14,396 8,597 36,963

% Distribution (12.9) (12.7) (12.0) (38.9) (23.2) (100)

1811 4,166 4,466 4,784 14,171 8,782 36,369

% Distribution (11.4) (12.2) (13.1) (38.9) (24.1) (100)

1821 5,105 6,290 7,231 16,555 11,767 46,948

% Distribution (10.8) (13.3) (15.4) (35.2) (25.0) (100)

1831 6,126 8,135 11,436 17,063 15,177 57,937

% Distribution (10.5) (14.0) (19.7) (29.4) (26.1) (100)

1841 6,325 8,741 13,320 21,474 19,505 69,365

% Distribution (9.1) (12.6) (19.2) (30.9) (28.1) (100)

1851 6,586 9,858 15,643 26,117 24,805 83,009

% Distribution (7.9) (11.8) (18.8) (31.4) (29.8) (100)

1861 7,487 9,145 17,100 29,490 32,749 95,971

% Distribution (7.8) (9.5) (17.8) (30.7) (34.1) (100)

1871 5,275 7,730 18,611 30,647 47,808 110,071

% Distribution (4.7) (7.0) (16.9) (27.8) (43.4) (100)

1881 4319 5,709 18,731 26,549 65,041 120,349

% Distribution (3.5) (4.7) (15.5) (22.0) (54.0) (100)

1891 3,501 3,623 19,637 28,326 84,728 139,815

% Distribution (2.5) (2.5) (14.0) (20.2) (60.6) (100)

1901 2,608 3,250 17,520 25,838 108,024 157,240

% Distribution (1.6) (2.0) (11.1) (16.4) (68.7) (100)

Source: D.J. Rowe, ‘Population of 19th Century Tyneside’, in N. McCord (ed.),

Essays in Tyneside Labour history (Newcastle, 1977), p. 20.

18

Figure 1: Distribution of Baptisms on Tyneside, 1739-1838

Note: The reader should be aware that chart is in stacked percentages, 0.0-1.0

being equal to 0-100%.

Source: Bills of Mortality

0.00

0.20

0.40

0.60

0.80

1.00

Pe

rce

nta

ge d

istr

ibu

tio

n

Decade

Gateshead

St Andrew's

St John's

St Nicholas

All Saints

19

Figure 2: Annual Total of Burials Recorded in All Saints Parish Burial

Register and those Recorded in the Bills of Mortality, 1736-1830

Source: See Figure 1

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

1736 1743 1750 1757 1764 1771 1778 1785 1792 1799 1806 1813 1820 1827

Nu

mb

er

of

bu

rial

s

Year

All Saints Burial Register

All Saints Burials in the Bills of Mortality

20

Figure 3: All Saints Parish Burials in the Bills of Mortality as a Percentage of

the Burials Recorded in the Parish Register and 5-year moving average,

1736-1830

Source: See Figure 1

0.0

25.0

50.0

75.0

100.0

125.0

150.0

175.0

200.0

1736 1746 1756 1766 1776 1786 1796 1806 1816 1826

Pe

rce

nta

ge

Year

Bills of mortality burials as a percentageof burials recorded in parish register

5 Year. Mov. Avg

21

Figure 4: All Saints Parish Burials and the ‘Ballast Hills effect’, 1736-1830

Source: See Figure 1

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

50.0

60.0

1736 1743 1750 1757 1764 1771 1778 1785 1792 1799 1806 1813 1820 1827

Pe

rce

nta

ge

Year

All Saints burials as a percentage of burials in the Billsof Mortality

5 year. Mov. Avg

22

Figure 5: Ballast Hills Burials as a Proportion of the Total Number of

Newcastle Burials and Five-year moving average, 1776-1848

Source: See Figure 1

0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

1777 1787 1797 1807 1817 1827 1837 1847

Pe

rce

nta

ge

Year

Ballast Hills 5 year. Mov. Avg

23

Table 3: Breakdown of Vital Events in the Bills of Mortality, 1736-1849

Percentage

distribution

(burials)

Percentage

distribution

(baptisms)

St Nicholas parish 8.9 10.7

All Saints parish 16.5 48.6

St John’s parish 12.2 14.6

St Andrew’s parish 12.5 13.3

Gateshead parish 6.4 6.4

St Ann’s parish 0.3 0.2

Gateshead St Mary’s

parish

6.0 4.8

Gateshead St John’s

parish

0.9 0.8

St Paul’s parish 0.4 0.1

St Peter’s parish 0.0 —

Ballast Hills burial

ground

30.0 —

Westgate Hill burial

ground

4.1 —

Jesmond Cemetery

ground

1.0 —

Friends Cemetery 0.0 —

New Cemetery 0.1 —

Total 100.0 100.0

Number 122,649 114,768

Source: See Figure 1

24