| Summary: | This paper contrasts the mortality experience of early modern Londoners living in the suburbs, the city centre and in the predominantly rural Middlesex hinterland surrounding the metropolis above the River Thames. Between 1550 and 1750, London grew to become the largest urban centre in Europe, but was able to do so only through migration, since no natural increase in the number of London-born children surviving was possible in its hazardous disease environment. London was thus of necessity strongly connected to provincial England via the movement of both people and goods, and to Europe and the North Atlantic for trade especially, but also through sporadic arrivals of international migrants. The paper presents new data based on church records from parishes in central Cheapside, and the extremely populous suburban parishes of Clerkenwell in the north west and Aldgate in the east. We consider the timing and synchronicity of epidemic mortality using annual counts of burials for several London and Middlesex parishes originally used by Finlay and Shearer to evaluate the population growth of the metropolis, and also long-term changes in the secular rate of mortality among the young. We find that urban and suburban London parishes all reacted strongly to epidemic outbreaks, but recovered at different rates. In the rural hinterland, eastern Middlesex parishes were more attuned to the epidemic cycles of London than western Middlesex parishes, probably because of their greater connectivity through shipping routes. We also find that infant mortality peaked sooner in some suburban areas than others. Furthermore, in London as a whole, the rise in infant mortality preceded and greatly exceeded in magnitude a rise in infant mortality that also occurred nationwide in England. Notwithstanding some variation in trends among London parishes, almost all of those studied displayed their highest rates of infant mortality at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A very large difference is also shown to have existed between suburban ...
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