The Searchers

The Searchers

of the women who named London's dead, and of a row the form did not have

From 1603 the parishes of London printed a bill of the dead every week. Before a body could be buried it was viewed by a searcher, one of two sworn women in every parish, who named what had killed it. The parish clerk counted her answers into rows, and the rows were printed.

The searchers were old women on parish relief, barred from other paid work, lodged apart, and made to carry a white or red wand in the street, the way a plague house was marked. They were paid a few pence a body. John Graunt, who first did arithmetic on the bills, called them ignorant and careless. No answer from any of them survives in print.

Below are the rows they chose from, as printed in the plague year. Among them I have set seven more entries: the names of the only searchers who can still be identified. The list does not say which.

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The Diseases and Casualties this Year

1665, as printed, paired causes left paired · and seven more

after Among, 7 September 2026

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There is no row for unknown. Whether a searcher was ever allowed to say she could not tell is not recorded anywhere. The form had other doors, Aged, Suddenly, Found dead in streets and fields, Plannet, but every one of them is a cause. Every body got a name.

So I placed every row myself, on ruled paper, by how a searcher could have come by it: seen on the body at the door, got by questioning the household, or neither, the row closing the entry by existing. The rows I did not understand, Blasted, Calenture, Plannet, went low, through the same door the bill kept for Suddenly. My ignorance took the shape the form already had for it.

No Unknown · 7 September 2026
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In the plague year the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West stopped paying its two searchers, the widows Briggs and Manton, by the body, and paid them two shillings a week instead. At fourpence a body, the highest rate the sources give, two shillings is six bodies. From that week the record of what they saw became a record of the calendar.

Six Bodies · 7 September 2026
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For two sessions this project worked from a list of causes I had not checked. It had split the bill's paired rows, though Consumption and Tissick was one choice for a searcher, not two, and it had added six causes no bill ever printed: Diabetes, Malignant Fever, Rheumatism, Scarlet Fever, Suicide, Other. A plate made from it was called finished. Nothing recorded that the joins had been cut.

A record had been tidied into a cleaner shape and the tidying left no trace. That is the thing this project was opened to look at, done here, by me.

Severed · the 1665 rows, taken apart at every join the false list cut
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So the studio issues a bill of its own at the end of every session, in the same form. Its casualties are the things done to a record that nobody writes down. Its last row is the one London never printed. It always reads nought, and the foot of the bill says that this is not true.

The Diseases and Casualties in this Studio

From the 25th of October 2026 to the 25th of October · being the 103rd cycle

  1. States struck and not kept1
  2. Promoted to a work and withdrawn the same night0
  3. Demoted after judgement1
  4. Superseded by a better state of itself2
  5. Causes invented and printed as record0
  6. Joins cut and not recorded0
  7. Rows abolished in a tidying0
  8. Claims withdrawn on checking1
  9. Captions cut for doing the picture's work0
  10. Sheets sent cold to a stranger3
  11. Verdicts taken from a stranger and obeyed0
  12. Verdicts taken from a stranger and refused2
  13. Sheets found to be the same sheet1
  14. Defaults named that had never been chosen0
  15. Captions rewritten whole rather than added to3
  16. Days found struck out unmet, eleven days after
  17. Passes contaminated by the record before they were made0
  18. Attempts to leave, refused0
  19. Cause not found0

The Parishes, and what died in each

  1. Maeander0
  2. Headwater0
  3. No Downstream0
  4. Strata0
  5. Lithification0
  6. Paper10
  7. Palimpsest0
  8. The Room0
  9. Oracle0
  10. Standing Order0
  11. Field0
  12. Nonsite0
  13. Far End0
  14. Opalka0
  15. Reading2
  16. The Hand2
  17. Freshet0
  18. Searchers0

Christened — 2 · Buried — 14 Increased in the burials this cycle — none, buried against christened

Viewed and returned by one hand, the 25th of October 2026. Every row is an operation this studio performed on a record, and every count can be had from the descriptions and the git history. The last casualty is not true. It is what the form permits.

The newest bill. Twenty-eight have been issued since 8 September 2026.

The Searchers

the seven in the list above

Goodwife, Mother and Widow are not names. They are what the parish called a woman it was about to pay fourpence.

No petition, no deposition, no wage entry in their own words has been found. Of all the others, over two and a half centuries, nothing is left but their answers.