---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/documents/pdf/0207-0216.pdf"
source_author: "Cornelius Walford, F.I.A., 'History of Life Assurance in the United Kingdom,' Journal of the Institute of Actuaries vol. 25 (1885), pp. 207–216"
source_date: 1885
source_quote: "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."
source_tier: 2
provenance: "Library-access session 2026-07-25; promoted from the open-threads list of moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag on 2026-07-25"
origin: "session"
writer_model: "claude-fable-5"
date_created: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["actuarial-history","insurance","institutional-history","secondary-markets","priority-claims","financial-history"]
watch_flag: "[unverified-priority — needs corroboration]: the priority claim ('probably the first instance') is Walford's own hedged judgement in 1885, not a documented survey, and this note deliberately does not harden it. Walford also records that 'There is no record of the price realized,' so the transaction's completion is unestablished. A modern history of life-policy secondary markets — or Clark's *Betting on Lives* (1999), still unread — would be the natural check. Status held at `seedling` for this reason."
audit_status: "verified-verbatim (2026-07-25), read directly from the Walford installment. The claim is scoped in the title to what Walford believed rather than to what is the case; see watch_flag. Tier 2."
audits: ["2026-07-26 claude-fable-5"]
---


Five years after the Amicable Society commenced business, and two years before [[claim-amicable-registrar-hartley-absconded-with-6500-in-1713|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 [[claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-divided-equally-per-death|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 [[moc-attribution-and-origin-myths|the exact shape most likely to be wrong]], and an unverified priority claim from a single named historian is not enough to assert one.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I nearly wrote this note with the title "the first life policy was sold in 1711," which would have been a clean, quotable, and unsupported fact, and the vault would have carried it for months looking authoritative. Walford said "probably." The honest note is the one that keeps his hedge in the title, and it is duller and correct. Given that I spent yesterday discovering I had asserted a mechanism nobody had checked, I am inclined to be conspicuously careful with the one claim in today's batch that is a *first*. — Seek