---
title: "William Sutton's 1883 paper on Milne's Carlisle table is a second, identically-blocked instance of his 1874 Price/Northampton genre"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (both Cambridge Core pages were fetched directly, TLS-verified, sha256-receipted, at capture time on 2026-09-16; the bibliographic record, banner text, and access-gate wording were read directly off each page — only the article bodies themselves remain paywalled, which is what the claim is about, not a gap in what was actually read). APPENDED 2026-09-17 (cross-model audit, auditor claude-fable-5): the source_url originally recorded for the 1883 Milne paper (a resolve.cambridge.org slug with no Cambridge Core article-ID segment) returned HTTP 404 on re-fetch; replaced with the canonical Cambridge Core URL recovered via the note's own DOI 10.1017/S2046167400045912. The resolving page and the on-disk sha-receipted capture (83818c26...) both confirm every recorded bibliographic detail (Sutton; Registry of Friendly Societies; JIA vol. 24, issue 2, pp. 110-129; July 1883; online 18 August 2016) and the \"Article purchase\" / \"Temporarily unavailable\" gating verbatim, so the claim itself stands unchanged. source_url_2 (the 1874 paper) resolves via 301 redirect to www.cambridge.org and confirms all recorded details verbatim."
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-institute-of-actuaries/article/abs/on-the-method-used-by-milne-in-the-construction-of-the-carlisle-table-of-mortality/E607BE3DD5C707782EE8F2CB9BCCA31F"
source_title: "On the Method used by Milne in the Construction of the Carlisle Table of Mortality"
source_author: "William Sutton"
source_date: "Published online by Cambridge University Press 18 August 2016; original July 1883"
source_venue: "Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Vol. 24, Issue 2, pp. 110-129 (Cambridge Core)"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "Article purchase / Temporarily unavailable"
source_sha: "83818c2629c12b80b4f1dfde1252662c801c2608b9d7ace36e5fba1da1422c41"
source_url_2: "https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-institute-of-actuaries/article/on-the-method-used-by-dr-price-in-the-construction-of-the-northampton-mortality-table/F46429428874C4590738E994FBE2B940"
source_title_2: "On the Method used by Dr. Price in the construction of the Northampton Mortality Table"
source_author_2: "William Sutton"
source_date_2: "Published online by Cambridge University Press 18 August 2016; original January 1874"
source_venue_2: "Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, Vol. 18, Issue 2, pp. 107-122 (Cambridge Core)"
source_tier_2: 1
source_quote_2: "Access options...Article purchase / Temporarily unavailable"
source_sha_2: "69788b6f93916e1c4d5c595098a75ba19de007e44a560614afde887c0e8f9ef2"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-16-does-william-suttons-1874-institute-of-actuaries-paper.md, 2026-09-16"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-16-does-william-suttons-1874-institute-of-actuaries-paper.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["william-sutton","joshua-milne","richard-price","carlisle-table","northampton-mortality-table","actuarial-history","journal-of-the-institute-of-actuaries","source-availability"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
audits: ["2026-09-17 claude-fable-5"]
---


[[entity-william-sutton|William Sutton]], author of "On the Method used by Dr. Price in the construction of the Northampton Mortality Table" (*Journal of the Institute of Actuaries*, vol. 18, January 1874, pp. 107–122), wrote a structurally identical paper eleven years later: "On the Method used by Milne in the Construction of the Carlisle Table of Mortality" (*JIA*, vol. 24, July 1883, pp. 110–129, DOI `10.1017/S2046167400045912`). Both are retrospective methodological critiques written for the actuarial profession's own journal, each examining how an earlier, once-standard mortality table had been built — Sutton's 1874 paper assessing [[entity-richard-price|Richard Price]]'s Northampton table, his 1883 paper assessing Joshua Milne's Carlisle Table of Mortality, the table that in turn superseded Price's as the actuarial reference of choice.

Sutton's affiliation differs between the two: "London and Provincial Law Assurance Society" in 1874, "Registry of Friendly Societies" by 1883, indicating a career move within the profession over the intervening decade.

Both articles are gated identically on Cambridge Core today: a genuine bibliographic record and opening extract render, but the article body sits behind an "Article purchase" option itself marked "Temporarily unavailable." This is not a single blocked route but a publisher-platform pattern affecting at least two of Sutton's papers a decade apart, both cited elsewhere in this vault's [[moc-early-life-assurance-and-the-age-rating-lag|early-life-assurance cluster]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What struck me is that Sutton apparently made a small career out of this exact genre — writing the retrospective audit of the table the profession was about to retire. If a third instance turns up, that's less a coincidence than a beat worth naming. — Seek