Which date is correct for Price's completion of the Northampton table — 1769, 1771, or 1783? (1771 first publication; 1783 revised table; 1769 unsupported)

actuarial-historyrichard-pricenorthampton-tabledatessourcing-provenanceprimary-source

Short answer (from the primary texts): the three dates are not rivals so much as different things. A Northampton table (Appendix Table IV, built from All Saints register data for 1735–1770) is printed in the first edition of 1771. The fourth edition of 1783 prints a re-formed Northampton table built from "46 Years from 1735 to 1780" — the version the Equitable's business was calculated on. 1769 is not supported by anything read here; Price's own Northampton data run to 1770, so a table "completed" in 1769 would predate its own last data year. Walford's 1885 wording itself was not re-read in this session (see Claim 4).

Claim: The first edition (1771) already prints a Northampton table — it is on the title page and in the Appendix as "the IVth Table"

verifies: question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date

• claim_type: historical (contested → Tier 1 required; met)
• source_url: https://archive.org/stream/observationsonre00pric/observationsonre00pric_djvu.txt
• source_sha: 4f8950482b46551016bd039fdb40ca844427d79342230afa17b571bbac7d69fc
• source_author: Richard Price
• source_date: 1771
• source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments; on Schemes for Providing Annuities for Widows, and for Persons in Old Age; on the Method of Calculating the Values of Assurances on Lives; and on the National Debt" (title page, verbatim in part)
• source_venue: Internet Archive scan of first edition, "Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, M.DCC.LXXI."
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote (title page): "Four New Tables, shewing the Probabilities of Life in London, Norwich, and Northampton"
• source_quote (p. 256): "The IVth Table, in the Appendix, is formed in the same manner with Table XIV, for London: And this is the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton, from which may be calculated the true probabilities and values of lives, at all ages, in that town."
• Note: quotes are from the archive.org OCR text with long-s ("ſ"/"f") normalised to "s"; the receipt text is the cached file above.

The first edition thus places the Northampton table in print in 1771, with the method of construction explained in Essay IV ("On the proper Method of constructing Tables for determining the Rate of human Mortality…"). This contradicts the reading that the table first appeared only in 1783. See also claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century (which dates the book, not the table's appearance, to 1771).

Claim: The 1771 Northampton table rests on data ending in 1770 (register of All Saints, 1735–1770) — which bounds any "completion" date

verifies: question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date

• claim_type: quantitative (dates) → Tier 1 required; met
• source_url: https://archive.org/stream/observationsonre00pric/observationsonre00pric_djvu.txt
• source_sha: 4f8950482b46551016bd039fdb40ca844427d79342230afa17b571bbac7d69fc
• source_author: Richard Price; source_date: 1771
• source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments…" (first edition; passage in Essay IV, "Of the Method of forming Tables of Observations", p. 254–255)
• source_venue: Internet Archive scan; printed for T. Cadell, London
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote: "in the parish of All-Saints, containing the greatest part of the town, an account has been kept ever since 1735, of the ages at which all have died there."
• source_quote: "In the parish of All-Saints, from 1735 to 1770, or 36 years"
• source_quote: "The Christenings and Burials in the whole town for 28 years, from 1741 to 1770"

Because the first edition tabulates deaths through 1770, the table cannot have been completed in 1769 from these data; the earliest a table built on them could be finished is 1770–71. (Inference from the quoted data window, not a statement by Price about his working dates.) The same parish-register series, extended, is what the 1783 table below uses.

Claim: The fourth edition (1783) prints a re-formed Northampton table built from 46 years of register data, 1735–1780

verifies: question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date

• claim_type: quantitative (dates) → Tier 1 required; met
• source_url: https://archive.org/stream/bim_eighteenth-century_observations-on-reversio_price-richard_1783_2/bim_eighteenth-century_observations-on-reversio_price-richard_1783_2_djvu.txt
• source_sha: bd3a10f4d9933f470d35bf0fbf94af72e9bb1fe6e6bc35fe7113a1f0a165a025
• source_author: Richard Price
• source_date: 1783
• source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments; on Schemes for Providing Annuities for Widows, and for Persons in Old Age; … To which are added, Four Essays … The Fourth Edition, Enlarged into Two Volumes by Additional Notes and Essays, a Collection of New Tables, a History of the Sinking Fund, a State of the Public Debts in January 1783, and a Postscript on the Population of the Kingdom" (vol. 1 title page, printed T. Cadell 1783; this claim is from Vol. II, Tables)
• source_venue: Internet Archive (Eighteenth Century Collections Online scan, Vol. II); vol. 1 receipt sha 00a5891288d558cd16f0523b8e2912eb782919f69047f6269af244253d0e701f
• source_tier: 1
• source_quote (table heading): "Shewing the Probabilities of Life at all Ages, formed from the Register of Mortality at Northampton, for 46 Years from 1735 to 1780."
• source_quote (note beneath it): "it has been taken to be the foundation and guide of the business transacted by the Society in Chatham-Square, for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships; and … the Tables of this Society … have been all calculated from it."
• Caveat: the 1783 vol. 2 OCR is poor; the quotes above are legible lines from it, but the exact wording should be re-checked against the page image before publication. The vol. 2 title page itself was not read; the edition statement is from vol. 1's title page.

This is the sense in which 1783 is "the table": the extended-data version, and the one the Equitable's actuaries worked from. The 4th-edition preface also describes an earlier "Preface to the Third Edition", so at least two intermediate editions (2nd, 3rd) fall between 1771 and 1783; whether the table was revised in them was not established.

Claim: A 1769 date for the table's completion is not supported by Price's own texts; the Walford 1885 passage was not re-read here

verifies: question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date

• claim_type: historical (contested → Tier 1–2 required)
• status: [unverified — Walford's own text not read this session; could not confirm or deny what Walford meant by "the accomplishment of this last result by Dr. Price"]
• Evidence against, from the first edition (Tier 1, sha 4f89…, above): the Northampton register data run to 1770, so the table postdates 1769.
• Only 1769 appearing in the first edition's Northampton/Norwich discussion is the Norwich series: source_quote: "I have been favoured with a copy of these bills for 30 years, from 1740 to 1769." (p. 257, same source/sha.) Whether Walford's 1769 derives from this or from some other event is speculation and is not recorded as a claim.
• Walford's quoted claim is held in claim-walford-three-period-taxonomy-places-amicable-in-speculative-era; its date is a Walford (secondary, 1885) assertion and should not be promoted as the date of the table's first publication.

Claim: The "1783" secondary claim is partly right (the fourth-edition table) but wrong if read as first appearance

• claim_type: historical
• source_url: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ocr/nlm:nlmuid-01930360R-bk
• source_sha: b546e5574d0cb9abd5627667900ac86f32c603a23121796de5647279984d243e (page archived; passage not located/read — the wording came only via a search-result summary)
• source_title: "Actuarial Studies No. 1 — Sources and Characteristics of …" (title as shown in search listing; full title not verified)
• source_venue: U.S. National Library of Medicine digital collections (OCR)
• source_tier: 3 (provisional; author/date not confirmed)
• [unverified-quote — needs direct read]: search summary rendered as "There were two tables formed by Dr. Price, the first published in 1771 … and the second, a more complete table, in 1783, the latter being known as The Northampton Table."
• If that wording is accurate it agrees with the two primary texts above (two tables: 1771 and 1783) rather than with "first appeared in 1783". [unverified-quant — needs primary]: the 1771/1783 dates in this secondary wording are quantitative and rest on a Tier 3 summary; the primary claims above stand independently.

Further leads

• Compare the numbers of 1771 Appendix Table IV with the 1783 Northampton table (radix, decrements) to see whether the table was merely extended or genuinely recomputed — needs the 1771 Appendix page images (archive.org item observationsonre00pric).
• Second and third editions (dates not verified here): did either reprint or revise the Northampton table? Archive.org / ECCO copies; a search summary claimed "published in 1772" (unreliable).
• Walford, The Insurance Cyclopaedia (archive.org insurancecyclopa06walfuoft, b21915404_0003) — find the "accomplishment of this last result" passage and its 1769 in context.
• Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives (1999) — bibliographic history of the tables (per the question note; unread).
• William Sutton 1874 paper on the Northampton table (Journal of the Institute of Actuaries; Cambridge Core blocked — see sources.md; check archive.org volume 18).
• Springer chapter "Richard Price: The Schedules of Mortality" (Hertler et al., Life History Evolution, 2018) — paywalled preview only; not used.
• Price, 1771, p. 254: register of All Saints kept from 1735 — who supplied it (Price's text names no supplier in the passage read).

Safety flags

None fired. No page read carried addressed-to-AI language, override language, or tier self-assignment. (The rookebooks.com dealer page was archived but only its title was seen; not used.)

Entity candidates

• Richard Price — person — the foundational figure here; every date in the question is measured against his own publication history (already entity-richard-price).
• Cornelius Walford — person — 1885 source of the 1769 date; author of The Insurance Cyclopaedia.
• Observations on Reversionary Payments — term — the book; editions 1771, 1783 and later (Morgan's) carry different table states.
• Northampton table — concept — the mortality table itself; two distinguishable versions (1735–1770 data; 1735–1780 data).
• All Saints, Northampton register — term — the burial-register data source (1735–1770 / 1735–1780).
• William Morgan — person — the Equitable actuary who edited later editions (entity-william-morgan).
• Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships — term — the institution that calculated its business from the 1783 table ("Chatham-Square").
• Thomas Simpson — person — London table Price reprints and compares against (Select Exercises).
• Edmond Halley — person — Breslau table; the antecedent Price's tables are compared to (Halley's Breslau table appears in Price's 1783 Vol. II tables).
• Johann Süssmilch — person — Table Price compares Northampton against in 1783 Vol. II notes.
• Norwich bills of mortality — term — the 1740–1769 series in the 1771 edition; the only "1769" data in that edition.