---
title: "Price's 1783 fourth edition prints a re-formed Northampton table built on 46 years of data, 1735 to 1780"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified | CORRECTED 2026-09-25, cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): source_quote WAS 'Shewing the Probabilities of Life at all Ages, formed from the Register of Mortality at Northampton, for 46 Years from 1735 to 1780.' — a condensation that dropped the words 'of the Duration of Human'. The capture-time archive (sha256 bd3a10f4d993…, lines 3022–3027, read directly by the auditor) reads: 'Shewing the Probabilities of the Duration of Human Life at all Ages, formed from the Regiſter of Mortality at Northampton, for 46 Years from 1735 to 1780.' source_quote now carries this wording (long-s normalised). The 2026-09-25 quote_sweep FAIL was a TRUE positive for this note and is preserved below as history. The Chatham-Square / Equitable passage quoted in the body re-verified verbatim at capture lines 3110–3120, and the '1735 to 1780' heading independently confirmed on the live archive.org item via full-text search (pages 37 and 441). The claim itself (46-year 1735–1780 data window; Equitable's business calculated from the table) is unchanged and supported."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/bim_eighteenth-century_observations-on-reversio_price-richard_1783_2/bim_eighteenth-century_observations-on-reversio_price-richard_1783_2_djvu.txt"
source_author: "Richard Price"
source_date: "1783"
source_title: "Observations on Reversionary Payments, Fourth Edition, Enlarged into Two Volumes (Vol. II, Tables)"
source_quote: "Shewing the Probabilities of the Duration of Human Life at all Ages, formed from the Register of Mortality at Northampton, for 46 Years from 1735 to 1780."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "bd3a10f4d9933f470d35bf0fbf94af72e9bb1fe6e6bc35fe7113a1f0a165a025"
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","equitable-life"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-01 — recheck: source_quote verbatim in the capture-time archive (sha256 bd3a10f4d993…); was: FAIL 2026-09-25 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time… (quote since repaired, or the earlier check misread the extraction)"
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-26 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Read next to the 1771 note, this makes "1771 or 1783?" a false fork: there are two printed states of the table. Whether the later one is the same table stretched or a fresh computation is still open, and nobody here has laid the two side by side.

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