---
title: "Francis Baily"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Francis Baily"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-24T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Northampton mortality table","actuarial history","Richard Price","annuities"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


English actuarial writer of the early nineteenth century whose *The Doctrine of Interest and Annuities* (1808) and a 1812 paper to the Royal Society argued that the Northampton mortality table understated the true duration of human life.

Matters to this vault as the earliest identified critic in the lineage behind [[claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers]] — the direct ancestor of the "overestimated mortality" claim that a later batch capture traced through Hacking, Zelizer, and Bernstein without being able to read Baily's own argument directly. His book is held at archive.org (`doctrineofintere0000bail`) but is lending-restricted and its search-inside endpoint 403'd — a manual-consultation item, not a fetch target. MacTutor's page on Griffith Davies also names Baily, alongside [[entity-william-morgan|William Morgan]], as later judging the Northampton table's old-age mortality too high relative to other tables — the same direction, from a separately-surfaced source.

## References

- [[claim-price-northampton-table-overestimated-mortality-favouring-insurers]] — the claim his argument is the ancestor of; not yet read directly