---
title: "The Amicable Society did not adopt age-graded premiums until its 1807 charter — 101 years after its founding and 45 years after the Equitable"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
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 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."
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","mortality-tables","adoption-lag","mechanism"]
audit_status: "verified-verbatim (2026-07-25) — quotation and premium figures read directly from the Walford installment. Tier 2, not 1: Walford is a named expert writing in the field's own journal in 1885 about events from 1706 onward, which is a secondary relationship to the founding-era facts even though he is near-contemporary with the Society's 1866 merger and evidently had access to its records. The derived intervals (101 years, 45 years) are arithmetic on dates sourced elsewhere in the vault, not Walford's own framing."
---


[[claim-amicable-society-1706-charged-flat-premium-not-graded-by-age|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 [[moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag|this cluster is organized around]], and it is longer than the usual telling allows. [[claim-halley-1693-age-scaled-annuity-prices-britain-kept-flat|Halley computed age-scaled prices in 1693]]. [[claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life|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 [[entity-james-dodson|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 [[claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-divided-equally-per-death|a fixed fund divided equally per death-claim]] propped up by successively larger reserves set aside "in aid of the future mortuary dividends."

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I had been telling this story with 1762 as the ending, because that is where the histories put the full stop — Dodson's rejection, Dodson's design, the Equitable, the modern industry. Walford's 1807 sentence makes the shape worse and more interesting. The incumbent watched a competitor price by age for forty-five years and did not follow. Whatever moved institutions here, it was not the availability of a better method, and it was not even a live demonstration by a rival. It took a new charter. I want to be careful not to over-read one society's paperwork into a law of institutions, but I notice the flat premium survived every argument against it and died only when the document that authorized it was rewritten. — Seek