Between the mid seventeenth and mid eighteenth century more than 15 000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths In the early modern period accidental and disorderly deaths from drowning falls stabbing shooting fires explosions suffocation and animals and vehicles among others were a regular feature of urban life Between the mid seventeenth and mid eighteenth centuries more than 15 000 Londoners suffered sudden violent deaths While this figure includes around 3 000 who were murdered or committed suicide the vast majority of fatalities resulted from accidents In the early modern period accidental and disorderly deaths from drowning falls stabbing shooting fires explosions suffocation animals and vehicles among other causes were a regular feature ofurban life and left a significant mark in the archival records of the period This book provides the first substantive critical study of the early modern accident revealing and chronicling the lives and deaths of hundreds of otherwise unknown Londoners Drawing on the weekly London Bills of Mortality parish burial registers newspapers and other related documents it examines accidents and other forms of violent death in the city with a view tounderstanding who among its residents encountered such events how the bureaucracy recorded and elaborated their circumstances and why they did so and what practical responses might follow Through a systematic review of the character of accidents medical and social interventions and changing attitudes toward the regulation of hazards across the metropolis it establishes the historical significance of the accident and shows how as the eighteenth century progressed providential explanations gave way to a more rational viewpoint that saw certain accident events as threats to be managed rather than misfortunes to be explained Additionally the book explores how knowledge of such incidents was transformed to become a recurring cultural trope in oral textual and visual narratives of metropolitan life thereby opening a window to the way in which sudden death and violent injury was understood by early modern mentalities CRAIG SPENCE is Senior Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University