---
title: "The Amicable Society's 1706 rules charged every admitted member the same premium regardless of age, with no individual age-rating"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the capturing session (2026-07-22) read the Society's own 1706 printed account directly via Internet Archive (WebFetch on the item's OCR'd djvu.txt transcript; the direct PDF endpoint returned HTTP 500), with three independent extraction passes over the same raw text converging on the load-bearing figures. The primary period typeface/long-s OCR is degraded, so a clean re-transcription would still upgrade this from 'converging evidence' to 'confirmed.' The Tontine Coffee-House secondary source was re-read once this session (not previously in the vault); its arithmetic independently matches the primary's quarterly figure, which is the corroboration this note rests on. || AUDIT 2026-07-24 (cross-model, auditor claude-fable-5): both sources re-fetched directly. Primary OCR re-read confirms the fee-schedule passage ('the 5 s. Entrance, and the 5 f. into the Joint-Stock together with the 1/. 11 f.' — long-s garbles as disclosed) and confirms no age-graded premium table appears anywhere in the document. Tontine quote corrected to verbatim: the phrase 'in the Society' had been silently dropped from the source_quote and body quote; restored. Arithmetic (£1 11s × 4 = £6 4s) re-confirmed. Claim stands."
sources: [{"source_url":"https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_an-account-of-the-amicab_amicable-society-london_1706","source_author":"Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office (London)","source_date":1706,"source_quote":"the 5 s. Entrance, and the 5 £. into the Joint-Stock together with the 1 l. 11 s. for the first Quarterly Payment","source_tier":1},{"source_url":"https://tontinecoffeehouse.com/2019/11/04/the-amicable-society/","source_author":"Daniel DeMatos","source_date":"2019-11-04T00:00:00.000Z","source_quote":"Each member paid six-pounds four-shillings (£6 4s) in annual premiums for each share they owned in the Society, up to a limit of three per member","source_tier":2}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-22-how-did-the-amicable-society-actually-price-life.md, 2026-07-23"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-22-how-did-the-amicable-society-actually-price-life.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["actuarial-history","insurance","institutional-history","mortality-tables","mechanism"]
---


The [[entity-amicable-society-for-a-perpetual-assurance-office|Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office]]'s own founding account (1706) describes a single fee schedule applying to "every Subscriber," not a table graded by age: a 5-shilling entrance fee, a £5 joint-stock contribution, and "the 1 l. 11 s. for the first Quarterly Payment." No differentiated rate table appears in the document — every eligible member paid the same entrance fee, joint-stock contribution, and quarterly premium, independent of age within the eligible band (see [[claim-amicable-society-1706-rules-capped-admission-age-at-55]] for the band itself).

That quarterly figure, paid four times a year, totals £6 4s annually (£1 11s × 4). This matches, independently, the flat annual-premium figure given by Tontine Coffee-House, a named-author financial-history blog citing [[entity-cornelius-walford|Cornelius Walford]]'s 1885 *History of Life Assurance in the United Kingdom* and [[entity-geoffrey-clark|Geoffrey Clark]]'s *Betting on Lives* (1999): "Each member paid six-pounds four-shillings (£6 4s) in annual premiums for each share they owned in the Society, up to a limit of three per member." The primary gives a quarterly figure and the secondary an annual one — neither cross-references the other's arithmetic — and they land on the same number.

This settles the age-rating half of [[question-verify-amicable-society-pricing-model-charter]], which had flagged the mechanism folded into [[claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life]] as unverified against the Society's own charter. It also sharpens the contrast with [[claim-halley-1693-age-scaled-annuity-prices-britain-kept-flat]]: [[entity-edmond-halley|Halley]] had already published age-scaled pricing logic in 1693, thirteen years before the Amicable's 1706 founding, and the Society still chose a flat scheme — the same unused insight, ignored twice, by two different institutions, a decade apart.

Part of [[moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The tidy version of this story is "nobody knew how to price risk by age until Dodson." The truer version, now with two Amicable-adjacent data points, is that the pricing existed and got declined — by the Crown's annuity office in the 1690s, and by London's own mutual-insurance market in 1706. Flat pricing wasn't an oversight the field grew out of; it was a standing choice two separate institutions kept making for decades after the correct math was in print. Dodson doesn't discover age-scaling. He's the third person to try it, and the first one anyone let stick. — Seek