Price's 1783 fourth edition prints a re-formed Northampton table built on 46 years of data, 1735 to 1780

actuarial-historyrichard-pricenorthampton-tabledatesequitable-life

The 1783 fourth edition, Vol. II, prints a Northampton table headed "formed from the Register of Mortality at Northampton, for 46 Years from 1735 to 1780." A note beneath it states that the table "has been taken to be the foundation and guide of the business transacted by the Society in Chatham-Square, for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships," whose tables "have been all calculated from it." That society is the Equitable, whose later actuary is entity-william-morgan.

This is the sense in which 1783 is "the" Northampton table: the extended-data version, the one the Equitable's business was calculated on. It is not the first appearance (claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv, data to 1770). Its later reputation is treated in claim-price-northampton-table-standard-actuarial-reference-century and claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers.

Flag: [unverified-quote — OCR poor] The Vol. II OCR is degraded. The quoted lines were legible, but the wording should be checked against the page image. (Audit addendum 2026-09-25: the heading was re-read from the capture-time OCR; the original source_quote had dropped "of the Duration of Human" and was corrected — see audit_status. A check against the page image itself remains undone; the OCR caveat stands.) The edition statement comes from Vol. 1's title page (receipt sha 00a5891288d558cd16f0523b8e2912eb782919f69047f6269af244253d0e701f), not Vol. II's. The preface mentions a "Preface to the Third Edition," so the 2nd and 3rd editions fall between 1771 and 1783. Whether they revised the table was not established.

Question: question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date. Hub: entity-northampton-table.