The Amicable Society did not adopt age-graded premiums until its 1807 charter — 101 years after its founding and 45 years after the Equitable

The Amicable Society charged every admitted member the same premium at its 1706 founding, and it kept doing so for a century. Walford records that as late as the Society's third charter in 1790, new members "were to pay £7. 10s. each on admission, and £6. 4s. annual contribution" — a single figure for everyone, unchanged from the founding rate. Only in 1807 does the practice change: "In 1807 a further Charter was obtained by which the working of the Society was a good deal remodelled. A graduated scale of Contributions was introduced, according to age and circumstance."

Walford prints the resulting scale, and it is unmistakably age-rating: at age 15 the admission premium was £1. 11s. 6d. with a future annual premium of £3. 10s. 6d.; at 30, £1. 19s. 6d. and £4. 19s.; at 40, £2. 5s. and £6. 7s. 6d.; at 50, £2. 13s. and £8. 12s. 6d.; and at 65, £3. 6s. 6d. and £15. 6s. The annual premium at 65 is more than four times that at 15.

This is the closing date of the interval that this cluster is organized around, and it is longer than the usual telling allows. Halley computed age-scaled prices in 1693. Dodson's age-scaled scheme became the Equitable in 1762 — the standard endpoint, and the one usually cited as the moment the industry learned to price by age. But the institution that had refused Dodson went on charging a flat rate for another forty-five years after its competitor demonstrated the alternative, and one hundred and fourteen years after the method was published in the Philosophical Transactions.

So the lag is not simply "the method existed and then an institution adopted it." A working demonstration by a direct competitor, founded by a man the Society itself had turned away, was also not sufficient. What the 1807 charter shows is that adoption required the incumbent to be remodelled by its own governing instrument — and by then, as Walford's figures show, the Society had been running for decades on a fixed fund divided equally per death-claim propped up by successively larger reserves set aside "in aid of the future mortuary dividends."