This data collection consists of a spreadsheet with details extracted from 6000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths in sixteenth-century England held at the National Archives. Tudor England was a dangerous place. There were plagues and wars, perilous childbirths and shocking infant mortality. But what risks did people face as they went about their everyday lives? Thousands of coroner's inquest reports on accidental deaths preserved at The National Archives allow us to investigate. These reports cover almost the whole of England, town and country, young and old, men and women, rich and poor. They tell us about working practices in farming, industry and housework and about leisure activities such as football, swimming, bell-ringing and riverside flower-picking, even the risks of getting too close to performing bears. They show contrasts between men's and women's lives, between different agricultural regions, between different times of day and seasons of the year. They show changes across the century, such as the replacement of archery by guns.

Reports submitted by sixteenth-century coroners were photographed and the details they contained about the incidents in which individuals died were abstracted into a spreadsheet.