0.
That’s on average the amount of years a person in Medieval England or Ancient Greece
lived.
Those life expectancies sound grim and measly compared to the 2017 worldwide life expectancy
of 72.2.
That’s over two and almost three times the amount expected in Ancient Greece, or the
Middle Ages.
But what if I told you that those numbers are misleading and that people didn’t die
in droves as the numbers suggest.
Let’s take Medieval England, where the life expectancy was 30.
That gives the impression that people rarely lived over the age of thirty.
A thirty-four year old would have been a freak of nature, while a fifty year old must have
warranted celebrity status.
But this is just plain wrong.
There is lots of evidence for older people in Medieval times.
What people get wrong about life expectancy is they assume that that number is how long
an adult could expect to live, but that is not the case.
Nowadays, the group that has the most amount of death is clearly the elderly, but what
life expectancy doesn’t account for is something that has been almost eliminated altogether
with modern technology, and that is child mortality.
If a person survived their first decade alive, their life expectancy increased dramatically.
Throughout history and even today, the group with the lowest risk of dying is children
between the ages of 10 and 12.
At this point, a person is exiting the danger zone for childhood maladies, but has not been
inducted into activities like warfare or dangerous labour.
English noblemen in the thirteenth century who made it to age 30 had a life expectancy
of 64.
You might say, well of course they lived longer because they were richer, but that’s not
necessarily true.
Nobles ate a lot of rich fattening foods which lowered their health, but interestingly improved
their status since obesity was a sign of wealth.
They also suffered from excessive drinking whereas the poor could not, and due to their
ability to travel from place to place, they suffered a lot from sexually transmitted infections.
But on average, they lived to 64.
You might say, well where are the numbers for the peasants?
And there are none.
Look up 1280 census and you won’t get any results because there were no censuses in
the thirteenth century only tax collectors.
The only way we know much of anything about individual lords and ladies is because of
accounts written about them.
Nobody wrote accounts of any kind for poor John Smith who went to the market everyday
at 6 in the morning to sell his barley.
64 is not far off from 72.2 when you exclude medieval child mortality.
The Middle Ages are also called the Dark Ages because of a lack of scientific and cultural
progress between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance, but the title
Dark Ages has nothing to do with death and destruction, but the Dark Ages definitely
carries those connotations, especially when compared to the terms Middle Ages or Medieval
Times.
How deadly were they really?
You might say, Aha!
I’ve got you now!
Peasants got slaughtered in wars while the nobles sat back and ate more unhealthy foods.
Ok.
First of all, many lords did ride into battle with their troops for honour.
Next, Imagine a large Medieval battle.
You’re probably thinking of one side slaughtering the other with hundreds or thousands dead,
but that is not true.
Every year, the average army lost approximately 5% of its men.
Getting maimed or killed in a Medieval battle was gruesome yes, and complete decimations
and mass-executions did happen, but were extremely rare and usually happened after a failed attempt
at diplomacy.
Since societies were impoverished, it was far more valuable to ransom enemies rather
than finish them off.
In sieges, it would rarely come down to a fight.
For the attacker, a long siege was costly in both time and supplies and usually offered
generous terms if the defenders surrendered, including allowing defenders to walk away
with their weapons.
So, in any other type of battle, unless the winning side really disliked the losing side,
there was nothing to gain in chasing enemies trying to run away only to slaughter them
when there were actual things to be gained elsewhere in a war.
It’s impossible to compare post-penicillin society to our pre-industrial revolution predecessors
because life as we know it has changed.
As a species, we advanced more in 150 years than we did for millennia.
There’s no way anyone in their right mind would want to live in the middle ages when
life was autocratic, dirtier, harsher, and far less convenient.
But why should we care about how long people lived in the days of yesteryear?
I suppose it’s for the same reason we care about history.
1.
It’s awesome.
Who isn’t amazed by castles and sieges and knights and longbowmen and well the list goes
on and on.
2.
Because understanding the past helps us understand and appreciate why the present is the way
it is and where we came from as both humans and as cultures.
And until next time.
Thanks for watching.