In London the deaths from fever in 1741 reached the enormous figure of 7528, the highest total in the bills of mortality from first to last, while the deaths from all causes were 32,119, in a population of some 700,000, also the highest total from the year of the great plague until the new registration of the whole metropolitan area in 1838. It will be seen from the following table (on p. 81) of the weekly mortalities that the fever-deaths rose greatly in the autumn, but, unlike the old plague, reached a maximum in the winter.

The effects of the epidemic of typhus upon the weaving towns of the west of England, in which the fever lasted, as in London, into the spring of 1742, were seen at their worst in the instance of Tiverton. It was then a town of about 8000 inhabitants, having increased little during the last hundred years. Judged by the burials and baptisms in the parish register it was a more unhealthy place since the extinction of plague than it had been before that. It was mostly a community of weavers, who had not been in prosperous circumstances for sometime past. In 1735 the town had been burned down, and in 1738 it was the scene of riots. The hard winter of 1739-40 brought acute distress, and in 1741 spotted fever was so prevalent that 636 persons were buried in that year, being 1 in 12 of the inhabitants. At the height of the epidemic ten or eleven funerals were seen at one time in St Peter’s churchyard. Its population twenty years after is estimated to have declined by two thousand, and at the end of the 18th century it was a less populous place than at the beginning[134].

Mortality by Fever in London, 1741-42.

Week
ending		 Fever All
causes
1741
March 10 123 660
17 103 564
24 112 624
31 105 573
April7 123 670
14 128 687
21 89 580
28 123 622
May5 104 495
12 141 587
19 129 573
26 153 600
June2 138 512
9 138 483
16 115 536
23 127 494
30 154 513
July7 149 523
14 162 551
21 130 485
28 151 621
Aug.4 128 512
11 142 541
18 172 636
25 192 665
Sept.1 171 675
8 190 691
15 182 760
22 199 748
29 189 733
Oct.6 207 784
13 192 787
20 232 793
27 234 850
Nov.3 250 835
10 228 772
17 182 670
24 214 806
Dec.1 224 768
8 203 748
15 191 761
22 179 775
29 180 702
1742
Jan.5 221 893
12 184 760
19 151 724
Feb.2 132 675
9 103 533
16 108 675
25 103 641

Effects of the Epidemic of 1741-42 on Provincial Towns.
(Short’s Abstracts of Parish Registers.)

Year Registers
examined		 With burials
more than
baptisms		 Baptisms in
the same		 Burials in
the same
1740 27 6 1409 1940
1741 27 14 3787 6205
1742 26 6 1721 3345

Other parts of the kingdom may be represented by Norwich, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The record of baptisms in Norwich is almost certainly defective; in only two years from 1719 to 1741, is a small excess of baptisms over burials recorded, namely, in 1722 and 1726, while in a third year, 1736, the figures are exactly equal. In 1740 there are 916 baptisms to 1173 burials, and in 1741, 851 baptisms to 1456 burials; while in 1742, owing to an epidemic of smallpox, the deaths rose to 1953, or to more than double the recorded births[135]. The distress was felt most in East Anglia in 1740. Blomefield, who ends his history in that year, says there was much rioting throughout the kingdom, “on the pretence of the scarcity and dearness of grain.” At Wisbech Assizes fourteen were found guilty, but were not all executed. In Norfolk two were convicted and executed accordingly. At Norwich the military fired upon the mob and killed seven persons, of whom only one was truly a rioter[136]. It was also in the severe winter of 1739-40 that the distress began in Edinburgh. The mills were stopped by ice and snow, causing a scarcity of meal; the harvest of 1740 was bad, riots took place in October, and granaries were plundered[137]. The deaths from fever were many in 1740, but were nearly doubled in 1741, with a significant accompaniment of fatal dysentery[138]:

Edinburgh Mortalities, 1740-41.

(Population in 1732, estimated at 32,000.)[139]

1740 1741
All causes 1237 1611
Consumption 278 349
Fever 161 304
Flux 3 36
Smallpox 274 206
Measles 100 112
Chincough 26 101
Convulsions 22 16