I ran across an article by Dr. Steven Gunn concerning accidental death in Tudor England (Link: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61702-4/fulltext). After looking into it some more the statistic that stands out to me is that ~40% of accidental deaths were drowning related. Out of curiosity I've been trying to find out what percentage of death's during the period were accidental so that I can get a rough number of how many total deaths were drowning related. However I can't seem to find anything further on the subject.
Gunn has said that the main problem is that this is only the coroner-led inquiries - so these are only the reports that justified an coroner, meaning that there's no way to calculate absolute (or even relative) numbers. However, they're looking at 9000 coroner inquests, so it looks like about 4000 deaths by drowning.
The actual website on the research is: http://tudoraccidents.modhist.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=220
And this is the timeline of what they're looking at and where they are: http://impact.ref.ac.uk/CaseStudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=3706