The Amicable Society pooled a fixed, pre-set annual dividend fund and divided it equally among the year's death-claims, not in proportion to shares held

The Amicable Society's 1706 founding account describes dividends set at a guaranteed level, not calculated per claim: "The Dividends to be added amongst the Claimants... commencing from the 15th of March... in the following Proportion, viz. The first Year 2000[l.]... at the least Annually ever after." That sets a floor on the total payout pool independent of how many members died or how sick they were, and it is confirmed directly from the primary text.

How that pool was then split is stated plainly by Cornelius Walford in the installment of his 1885 history that reaches the Society's founding: "This depended entirely upon the number of deaths during the year, the sum appropriated for annual division being equally divided by the number of deaths." The fund was divided equally per death-claim. Walford's own worked figures confirm the arithmetic to the farthing: in the second year £4,000 was divided among 96 deaths, "and the share of each was £41. 13s. 4d." — exactly £4,000 ÷ 96; in the fourth year 87 deaths against a £8,000 fund gave "£91. 19s. 0¾d.", exactly £8,000 ÷ 87. (The third year reads "£50. 3s. 6¼d." against £6,000 and 122 deaths, where the quotient is £49. 3s. 7d. — the pattern of the other years makes this almost certainly a printed or transcribed £50 for £49.)

This is a materially different mechanism from the one this note previously asserted. Under equal division per claim, a member's payout depended on how many other members happened to die that year, not on any stake held relative to the pool — which is why Walford calls the arrangement "a species of Mortuary Tontine, except that the smaller the number of subscribers dying in each year the better for their nominees." At founding there was in any case no varying stake to be proportional to: every member paid the same fixed contribution of £6. 4s. per annum, as recorded in claim-amicable-society-1706-charged-flat-premium-not-graded-by-age.

The word doing the damage was "share." Walford uses it throughout in the sense of a share of the divided death-fund — "death-share," "a share of the death sum," "£50. 3s. 6¼d. per share" — and never in the sense of an equity holding. Read in the modern sense, those same sentences yield exactly the shares-proportional rule that Tontine Coffee-House states without a citation and that this note carried until now.

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