Medieval Life Expectancy Wasn’t What You Think
Medieval life expectancy tables have a way of misleading people, because the statistic that actually matters – how old you’d live to be if you’d survived childhood – tells a different story from the average over the whole country.
Infant and childhood mortality was truly brutal, and this dragged the average life expectancy figure right down. But anyone who’d made it to their teens had already seen off the single biggest danger, and from there on the odds changed altogether: living into your seventies or eighties was an entirely feasible outcome, not an occasional freak accident. From early adulthood onwards, the greatest risks diverged, by sex: for men, warfare and dangerous manual trades such as roofing, timber-felling, or horse- or ox-driving, but for women, the very real dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, repeated throughout a couple’s fertile years. It’s partially why the records of the longest-lived people in history so often turn out to be churchmen, who neither fought nor bore children, and nuns, who at least avoided the second risk.
One genuinely surprising case on the secular front is a 15th-century duchess who bore twelve children across her marriage and still lived to eighty, dying just after her birthday in 1495. A surviving contemporary poem lists her children by name, tracking the family’s losses with a matter-of-fact bluntness – several sons died as infants, and one son died as a teenager fighting alongside his father, but only one daughter died in infancy, out of five who survived to adulthood – a roughly fifty-eight per cent survival rate to adulthood across her family, better than many households, rich or poor, could manage. Two of her surviving sons went on to become kings of England, which puts a rather different spin on ‘family history’ than the modern version usually implies.
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