Policies of the Amicable Society were offered for sale in 1711, in what Walford believed was probably the first sale or attempted sale of a life policy

Five years after the Amicable Society commenced business, and two years before its registrar absconded with £6,500, Walford records that "in 1711, several of the policies of the Society were offered for sale. This was probably the first instance of the sale, or attempted sale, of a Life Policy. There is no record of the price realized." He adds that "Later still, Insurance brokers advertized that they desired to buy policies in the Society," so the interest was not a one-off.

If Walford is right, this dates the origin of a life-policy secondary market — the ancestor of what is now called viatical or life-settlement trading — to within five years of the founding of one of England's first life-assurance mutuals. The instrument and the market for reselling the instrument appear almost together.

The Amicable's structure makes the appetite legible. Because the Society divided a fixed annual fund equally among that year's death-claims, a policy's eventual payout depended on how many other members died in the year of the holder's death — a quantity nobody could forecast, and which had already swung wildly in the Society's first four years, from £30. 3s. 8d. per claim to £91. 19s. 0¾d. A holder wanting certainty had reason to sell, and a buyer confident about mortality had reason to buy. The Society had also, by 1733, found it necessary to keep "a register of assigned policies," which suggests transfers became common enough to require administration.

The priority claim itself is held loosely and deliberately. It is Walford's hedged judgement — "probably" — offered in 1885 without a supporting survey, and this note's title is scoped to what he believed rather than to what happened. The vault treats confident firsts as the exact shape most likely to be wrong, and an unverified priority claim from a single named historian is not enough to assert one.