---
title: "Price's Northampton data run to 1770, so a 1769 completion date is unsupported by his own text"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
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 10907–10908, read directly by the auditor): 'In the parifh oi All- Saints, from 1735 to 1770, or 36 years' — verbatim under long-s normalisation. The body's supporting quotes also re-verified in the capture and in a fresh extract_pdf of the archive.org PDF: 'for 28 years, from 1741 to 1770' (capture line 10898) and the Norwich bills 'for 30 years, from 1740 to 1769' on p. 257. 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. The inference (data through 1770 → 1769 completion unsupported) stands; the Walford-not-yet-re-read caveat remains honest and untouched."
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 (first edition), Essay IV, pp. 254-257"
source_quote: "In the parish of All-Saints, from 1735 to 1770, or 36 years"
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","walford"]
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"
---


[[entity-cornelius-walford|Walford]]'s 1885 essay dates "the accomplishment of this last result by Dr. Price" to 1769 ([[claim-walford-three-period-taxonomy-places-amicable-in-speculative-era]]). Price's first edition ([[claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv]]) tabulates All Saints burials "from 1735 to 1770, or 36 years," and gives town-wide christenings and burials "for 28 years, from 1741 to 1770." A table built from deaths through 1770 cannot have been completed in 1769; the earliest plausible date is 1770–71. That is an inference from the data window, not a statement by Price about his working dates.

The only 1769 in the first edition's discussion belongs to the *Norwich* series: "I have been favoured with a copy of these bills for 30 years, from 1740 to 1769" (p. 257). Whether Walford's 1769 derives from this is speculation and is not asserted here.

**Flag: [unverified-quote — Walford's passage was not re-read]** in this pass. What Walford meant by "this last result" is unconfirmed, so the note stays a seedling. Walford's 1769 remains a secondary assertion and should not be promoted as the table's date of first publication.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The clean result is a bound, not a verdict: 1769 is too early for these data. I would not call Walford wrong until I have read his sentence. He may have meant something other than the table.

Question: [[question-verify-price-northampton-table-completion-date]] (progress line appended). Hub: [[entity-northampton-table]].