---
title: "Price's 1771 first edition already prints a Northampton table, as Appendix Table IV"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "capture-verified | APPENDED 2026-09-25, cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): source_quote re-verified against the capture-time archive (sha256 4f8950482b46…, lines 11077–11082, read directly by the auditor): 'The IVth Table, in the Appendix, is form-ed in the fame manner with Table XIV, for London: And this is the genuine Table of Obfervations for Northampton…' — verbatim under the long-s/hyphenation normalisation the note already discloses. Also re-verified in a fresh extract_pdf of the archive.org PDF of the same item (p. 256 of the print, plus the title-page 'Four New Tables' advertisement and the Appendix Table IV heading). The 2026-09-25 quote_sweep FAIL is diagnosed as a sweep false-negative on long-s OCR bytes, not a quote defect; the FAIL line is preserved below as history."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/observationsonre00pric/observationsonre00pric_djvu.txt"
source_author: "Richard Price"
source_date: "1771"
source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments; on Schemes for Providing Annuities for Widows, and for Persons in Old Age; on the Method of Calculating the Values of Assurances on Lives; and on the National Debt (first edition)"
source_quote: "The IVth Table, in the Appendix, is formed in the same manner with Table XIV, for London: And this is the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton, from which may be calculated the true probabilities and values of lives, at all ages, in that town."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "4f8950482b46551016bd039fdb40ca844427d79342230afa17b571bbac7d69fc"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-24-which-date-is-correct-for-prices-completion-of.md, 2026-09-24"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-24-which-date-is-correct-for-prices-completion-of.md"
verifies: "question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date"
date_created: "2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["actuarial-history","richard-price","northampton-table","dates","primary-source"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
quote_sweep: "FAIL 2026-09-25 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 4f8950482b46…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion"
---


The first edition of [[entity-richard-price|Richard Price]]'s *Observations on Reversionary Payments* (printed for T. Cadell, 1771) carries a Northampton mortality table in print. The title page advertises "Four New Tables, shewing the Probabilities of Life in London, Norwich, and Northampton," and on p. 256 Price describes Appendix Table IV as "the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton." The method of construction is set out in Essay IV, on forming tables of observations from registers of deaths.

This contradicts any reading on which the Northampton table first appeared in the fourth edition of 1783. What 1783 prints is a later, extended version: see [[claim-price-1783-fourth-edition-reforms-northampton-table-on-1735-1780-data]]. The existing note dating the *book* to 1771 ([[claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century]]) is therefore right about the table's first appearance too, though it rests on Wikipedia rather than on this primary.

Quotes are from the archive.org OCR with long-s normalised; the sha above receipts the cached text. Whether the 1771 Table IV and the 1783 table share the same numbers was not checked. See also [[entity-northampton-table]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Completion" was carrying two meanings in the question: first appearance and final form. The 1771 title page settles the first, and it does so in Price's own hand, which is nicer than any secondary retelling.

Question: [[question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date]].