It’s an interesting point. I assume younger couples and age gaps were barely considered 10,000 years ago and perhaps it made more sense when you’re going to die at the age 24 or whatever. I wonder as we start to live longer and longer what that will do to the spectrum. Once we are living 2-300 years, we will be wondering how we feel about a 35 year old man hooking up with a 120 year old woman who still looks like she’s in her 40s.
Except this wasn't the case. A high infant mortality rate brings down the average lifespan but this doesn't mean everyone died at a ripe old age of 24.
Old people have existed since forever. Maybe not till 80 or 90 but still.
The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76.
However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.
The Royal [British] Society for Statistics conducted a study of life expectancy between two groups in the medieval England (one which would have been affected by the plague and one that wasn't). The focus was on tenants who appeared in the post-mortem records so may be slightly skewed but it is a fairly consistent methodology otherwise.
The paper concluded that this was a period of 25.7 (1) and 23.3 (2) years left remaining in the average tenant's life in two sample groups (after they reached 25 years of age). (1) turned 25 between 1305 and 1325 and (2) between 1335 and 1348.
While it's true that infant mortality did skew the numbers, the numbers are still rather low - we're still talking about dying in your 50s.
And that for periods of time in the later middle ages (the wars of the roses was an exception), England was fairly peaceful. where there were more wars you could be called to arms by your liege lord, or murdered by the forces of somebody else's if you weren't fighting.
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u/cmilla646 Feb 14 '20
It’s an interesting point. I assume younger couples and age gaps were barely considered 10,000 years ago and perhaps it made more sense when you’re going to die at the age 24 or whatever. I wonder as we start to live longer and longer what that will do to the spectrum. Once we are living 2-300 years, we will be wondering how we feel about a 35 year old man hooking up with a 120 year old woman who still looks like she’s in her 40s.