How did the Amicable Society actually price life assurance — did it pool members without age-rating and split a fixed dividend among survivors?

This capture answers question-verify-amicable-society-pricing-model-charter, which flagged the Amicable Society pricing description folded into claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life as an [unverified-mechanism] resting on Tier 3-4 secondary sources, "not independently verified against the Amicable Society's original charter." This session located and read the Society's own 1706 printed account (via Internet Archive, OCR'd) plus a named-author secondary account that independently cites the two standard scholarly references (Walford 1885, Clark 1999).

Bottom line: the core question's premise is confirmed, with one caveat. The Amicable Society did pool members within a coarse age-eligibility band rather than grading premiums by individual age, and it did distribute a fixed, pre-set annual dividend fund among the claimants of members who died that year. The primary source's OCR quality is poor enough that exact figures should still be treated as needing a clean transcription before full promotion, but three independent extraction passes over the same raw text converged on the same readings, and the flat-premium figure cross-validates arithmetically against the independent secondary source.

Claim: Every admitted member paid the same premium regardless of age — the Amicable Society did not grade premiums by individual age

Claim type: quantitative + technical-mechanism. Floor: Tier 1-2 required. Met: Tier 1 (primary pamphlet) corroborated by Tier 2 (Tontine Coffee-House).

The Society's own 1706 account describes a single fee schedule applying to "every Subscriber," not a table graded by age: "the 5 s. Entrance, and the 5 £. into the Joint-Stock together with the 1 l. 11 s. for the first Quarterly Payment" (OCR'd primary text; the "l."/"£." and "s." symbols are pounds and shillings). Asked directly whether the document specifies different contribution amounts for different ages, two independent extraction passes over the same text both concluded no differentiated rate table is present — every eligible member pays the same entrance fee, joint-stock contribution, and quarterly premium.

That quarterly figure of £1 11s, paid four times a year, totals £6 4s annually (£1 11s × 4 = £4

• 44s = £6 4s). This matches, independently, the flat annual-premium figure given by the secondary source: "Each member paid six-pounds four-shillings (£6 4s) in annual premiums for each share they owned, up to a limit of three per member" (Tontine Coffee-House, citing Walford 1885 and Clark 1999). The two sources were not cross-referencing each other's arithmetic — the primary gives a quarterly figure, the secondary gives an annual one — and they land on the same number, which is reasonable independent corroboration despite the primary's OCR degradation.

Claim: Membership was screened by a coarse age band (not individually rated) — admission was capped at the top end around 55, per the 1706 rules

Claim type: quantitative (specific age figures). Floor: Tier 1-2 required. Met: Tier 1 for the upper bound; the lower bound is unverified.

The 1706 pamphlet states an eligibility window rather than a graded scale: reconstructed across two independent OCR passes, "None to be admitted a Member under [Ten/Twelve — OCR ambiguous], or above Fifty five Years of Age." The upper bound of 55 read consistently as "Fifty five" in both passes. The lower bound is genuinely ambiguous in the OCR — one pass read "Ten," another read "full Twelve Years of Age" — and is marked [unverified-quant — needs primary] pending a clean transcription of the pamphlet (the archive.org PDF endpoint itself returned an error this session; a re-attempt or a library/ODNB-grade transcription would resolve it).

This creates an open tension worth flagging rather than silently reconciling: the existing vault claim claim-dodson-refused-amicable-society-over-age-45 has Dodson turned away for being "over 45" in the 1750s, decades after this 1706 rule set an upper cap of 55. Both figures are independently sourced (this capture's primary pamphlet vs. the existing claim's Tier-4 Wikipedia), so this is not simply an error to pick a winner on — it may mean the Society's age cap tightened sometime between 1706 and the 1750s, or one of the two figures is a transcription/OCR error, or the Wikipedia "45" itself is imprecise. Not resolved this session; recorded as a lead below rather than asserted either way.

Claim: The Society pooled a fixed, pre-set annual dividend fund and distributed it among the claimants (heirs) of members who died that year, rather than paying individually calculated sums

Claim type: quantitative (the specific fund figures) + technical-mechanism (how payout was determined). Floor: Tier 1-2 required. Met: Tier 1 for the existence and rough size of the fixed fund; Tier 2 for the proportional-to-shares distribution detail.

The 1706 pamphlet describes dividends set at a guaranteed minimum level rather than calculated per claim: reconstructed from OCR (consistent across two independent passes targeting this passage), "The Dividends to be added amongst the Claimants... commencing from the 15th of March... in the following Proportion, viz. The first Year 2000[l.]... the second Year 3000[l.]... at the least Annually ever after." Read plainly, this sets a guaranteed floor on the total pool available for payout — £2,000 in the Society's first year, at least £3,000 in every year after — independent of exactly how many members died or how sick they were, which is the "fixed dividend" mechanism the topic question asks about. The exact wording of "in the following Proportion" is not fully legible in the OCR, so the precise mechanics connecting the fund total to individual payouts are not confirmed from the primary text alone.

The specific rule for splitting that fund among claimants — proportional to shares held, not divided equally per claimant — comes from the secondary source: "At the end of each year, the collections were split amongst heirs of deceased members in proportion to the shares those members owned" (Tontine Coffee-House, citing Walford 1885 and Clark 1999). This clears the Tier 1-2 floor for a mechanism claim on the strength of the named author's citation trail to Walford and Clark, but it has not been independently confirmed against the primary pamphlet's own text, whose relevant passage is the most OCR-degraded of the three quoted here.

Further leads

• The archive.org PDF endpoint for the 1706 pamphlet returned HTTP 500 via extract_pdf this session; only the OCR'd djvu.txt (fetched via WebFetch, with attendant summarization risk) was usable. A clean re-extraction attempt, or a manual page-image read, would resolve the two [unverified-quant] flags above (minimum entry age; exact proportion wording).
• Total membership cap is inconsistently reported across sources encountered this session — some give "two thousand," one OCR pass on the primary pamphlet read "Two Hundred Persons of either Sex." Not resolved; genuinely unclear whether this is an OCR error or a real early/later version discrepancy. [unverified-quant — needs primary]
• M. E. Ogborn, Equitable Assurances: The Story of Life Assurance in the Experience of the Equitable Life Assurance Society 1762–1962 (1962), and Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester University Press, 1999) — both named by Tontine Coffee-House as underlying sources and both plausible Tier 1-2 primaries for this whole topic, but neither was directly read this session (no accessible full text found via search; Google Books previews did not surface the relevant passages).
• The Aviva heritage page on the Amicable Society (https://heritage.aviva.com/our-history/companies/a/amicable-society) returned HTTP 403 this session — Aviva (via Norwich Union, which absorbed the Amicable in 1866) is a plausible corporate-heritage source worth a retry.
• Cornelius Walford's original 1885 article, "History of Life Assurance in the United Kingdom" (Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, vol. 25), is on JSTOR (stable/41135809) but was not fetched this session (access not attempted) — this is the primary scholarly source Tontine Coffee-House itself cites, and would be a stronger direct source than the blog.
• The apparent tightening of the entry-age cap from 55 (1706 rules, this capture) to 45 (per the vault's existing Dodson claim, 1750s) is unresolved — worth a dedicated question if a source ever states the rule changed, rather than treating one figure as simply wrong.

Entity candidates

• Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office — concept/institution — the subject itself; central to multiple existing claims (claim-dodson-refused-amicable-society-over-age-45, claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life) but has no entity page yet
• Cornelius Walford — person — 19th-century insurance historian whose 1885 Journal of the Institute of Actuaries article underlies most secondary accounts of the Amicable Society's mechanics
• Geoffrey Clark — person — historian, author of Betting on Lives (1999), the standard modern academic account of early English life insurance culture
• Daniel DeMatos — person — named author of the Tontine Coffee-House blog; a recurring financial-history source candidate for 00-meta/specs/sources.md
• William Talbot, Bishop of Oxford — person — credited co-founder of the Amicable Society, 1706
• Sir Thomas Allen — person — financier credited as co-founder of the Amicable Society, 1706