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

The vault note claim-dodson-built-age-scaled-premiums-founding-equitable-life folds in a description of the Amicable Society's pricing model as the crude scheme Dodson's age-scaled premiums were built to correct: the Amicable is said to have admitted members within an age band without individually rating their risk, and to have split a fixed annual dividend among the surviving members. The seeding capture flagged this mechanism explicitly: it rests on Tier 3–4 secondary sources and is "not independently verified against the Amicable Society's original charter."

Why it matters. This is a technical-mechanism claim about how a specific institution operated, and the sourcing floor (00-meta/specs/sources.md) puts mechanism claims at Tier 1–2. It is also load-bearing: the "age-scaling was a genuine correction" reading only holds if the Amicable really priced this bluntly. If the society did apply some finer gradation, the improvement Dodson represents is smaller than the story implies.

What would resolve it.

• The Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office's original charter / deed of settlement (founded 1706) — the primary governing document.
• A primary-grounded actuarial history: M. E. Ogborn's Equitable Assurances (1962), or Geoffrey Clark's Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (1999), which treat the Amicable's mechanics from archival sources.

Until then the note keeps its [unverified-mechanism] flag and stays seedling.

Progress log

• 2026-07-23 (promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-22-how-did-the-amicable-society-actually-price-life.md): claim-amicable-society-1706-charged-flat-premium-not-graded-by-age, claim-amicable-society-1706-rules-capped-admission-age-at-55, claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-split-by-shares-held — settled by a direct (OCR'd) read of the Society's own 1706 founding pamphlet via Internet Archive, cross-checked against Tontine Coffee-House's independently arithmetic-matching secondary account: the Society did charge a flat premium with no individual age-rating, and did pool a fixed pre-set annual dividend among claimants, confirming the question's premise. One sub-mechanism remains unconfirmed against primary — the exact rule for splitting the fund proportionally among claimants rests on the secondary source alone — and is routed onward to question-verify-amicable-society-dividend-distribution-mechanism-primary rather than blocking this question's closure.