h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone any idea?

My understanding is that you could expect to live for not much shorter than you can expect to now - provided, that is, that you make it out of infancy in the first place. The big increase in average life expectancy has mostly been brought about by a massive reduction in infant mortality. Once you had made it out of that danger zone, you had a fairly good chance of living well into your 70s and beyond, just like today.

35 to 40 average this would exclude infant mortality

as an aside to that, the rich lived longer (except in times of war). The very poor often went un recorded in the main so it is difficult to be 100% accurate

Thanks guys- any other offers?

In saying that surviving infancy meant probably living to a ripe old age,you are ignoring half the population. Many, many women died in childbirth.
Also there were no anti-tetanus injections, not even any aspirin. So what we would now consider minor accidents could kill you. Three score years and ten was an aspiration, not a commonplace.
My own immediate family died in their nineties, but go back a hundred years and few of them made 50.

It's not so much ignoring women who died in childbirth - it's just that many more babies did, so it had a larger impact on the mean age.

Child mortality could be as high as 30% even in the gentry classes

Okay then, let's simplify: assuming you make it to the age of ten, what do we reckon your likely life expectancy is?

50.
Shakespeare made 54. He avoided both the plague and murder which did for some of his contemporaries.

To widen it beyond Shakespeare, a male member of the aristocracy, based on what limited stats I can find, could expect to live to 71 if he made it to 21 (H.O. Lancaster, "Expectations of Life"). I'm aware of the limitations in the sample, but here's just no way to get around the problem that we don't have enough data.

Using the very select sample of William Shakespeare and his twenty two close relatives, their average age at death was roughly 36.

Eight of them died before the age of 12, so removing them from the sample the average age at death rises to nearly 53.

William was 52 at his death not 54 as previously mentioned.

Both William's mother and father made it past 70, his sister Joan and his daughter Judith made it to 77.

This was a family that was reasonably well off in Elizabethan terms, what was called 'the middling sort'.

They also had the advantage, after Susanna's marriage to John Hall, of their very own 'Family' doctor.

I should point out that twelve of them also died in the Jacobean era, before someone else does.

Another danger faced by rich women in particular was their make-up. Queen Elizabeth herself, as well as many other fashionable ladies, applied a layer of Venetian ceruse to their face. This was made of white lead and is poisonous when absorbed through the skin's pores. Venetian ceruse had the effect of making women's skin look like they'd been coated in plaster. Those who wore it usually just kept adding another layer now and then rather than wash the old layer off. Side effects included the white lead rotting the wearer's teeth (creating terrible bad breath), discoloured skin, hair falling out, swollen and inflamed eyes, damaged mouth and throat and the lead would gradually destroy the woman's lungs.
Fortunately if you were poor, you didn't have any of that to worry about.

But life expectancy would be quite different depending on your sex, class, occupation and religion.

<BB<

As has previously been said - your two biggest killers, biggest reducers of any simple average, were death in infancy or from complicatons of childbirth.

If you were male and could make it to puberty, or female and make it to menopause, your expectancy wasn't much different than today. Yes, in 1500 there was the risk of dying from a simple illness or injury that could be cured by antibiotics or a simple operation (e.g. appendicitis) or from other risks we've eliminated (being burned at the stake for being Catholic or whatever), but in 1500 your risk of being killed by a car was zero, whereas something like ten people in the UK are killed by cars every day. Swings and roundabouts. (Insert gag about swings and roundabouts being dangerous too). There are many risks to life and limb in 2013 that didn't exist in 1500.

I wonder how many more people were killed by horses in the non-industrialised era?

Not that many, as few could own a horse 2% to 4% from riding accidents hunting and military training.

For the lower orders the rate would have been higher 5% to 6% or so of those involved with horses in farming, transport and road accidents, . However many would have died a long period of of complications caused by an accident kick or fall.

It is impossable to calculate this as few records were kept.

This thread reminded me of an animation I saw a while ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

It only goes back to 1810, and I haven't looked in more detail at the source of the data used in the animation, but it does give a flavour of the situation.

Two other major causes of Death in Elizabethan times may not
yet have been mentioned. Murder and drowning.


(In an age when the 'right of clergy' gave educated persons (ie: the lierate)
the right to kill an uneducated (ie: illiterate) person, more than a few murders
went unpunished. At least one of Shakespeare's friends and contemporaries
was notoriously famous for having killed a loud mouthed critic with impunity
by claiming the right of clergy.)


Oh and war was another biggie, but curiously most war casualties in those days
were down to disease.


~jwf~

SashaQ

I think that may be very close to the answer.

How different were lives in 1810 from the Elizabethan era.

OK canals had happened and the earliest bits of the industrial revolution had begun. But the really big changes were yet to come.

So the age ranges he gives for the early 1800's are probably not that much different from the 1500's.

Would it be splitting hairs to point out that Shakespeare died in the Jacobean era?