ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the set of parameters that exercised Sir George Newman's attention in so far as they are identifiable and measurable within datasets that are spatially more restricted than those available to Newman, but extending over a 250-year period prior to the onset of civil registration in 1837. It aims to exploit changes in those parameters, particularly using trends in the component parts of infant mortality to make greater sense of the ways in which mortality regimes as a whole changed across the early modern period. Although infant mortality was such an important component of overall mortality and hence a central factor determining life expectancy at birth it would be unwise to assume that it provided a relatively straightforward predictor of overall survivorship trends. In fact there were periods in which movements in Infant Mortality Rates and other age-specific mortality rates were at best only loosely positively correlated.
