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mortality « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Posts Tagged ‘mortality’

The vulnerability of non-marital births

Thursday, January 30th, 2025

Alice Reid

A previous blog charted trends in non-marital conceptions and births in England from 1550 to the present. It argued that although many couples engaged in sexual intercourse before marriage, in most cases when a woman fell pregnant she and her partner married swiftly, so that the majority of extra-marital conceptions were born within marriage. Not all pregnant women were able to marry however, giving rise to extra-marital births, or ‘illegitimate’ children.

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Who dies of old age?

Thursday, November 14th, 2024

Alice Reid

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died on 8th September 2022. Aged 96, her death certificate gave her cause of death as simply ‘Old Age’. It’s undeniable that she was old when she died, but how common is old age as a cause of death now and in the past, and what can the history of death from old age tell us? 

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How scarce were the elderly in the British past?

Thursday, October 10th, 2024

Richard Smith

Today those aged 60 and over make up slightly more than 1 in 5 of the UK population. It is tempting to believe that in the distant past, because there were fewer older people, they enjoyed a greater cachet. But how far is this view born out in the English case by the findings of historical demography? Is it correct to regard age structures over the deeper past as unvarying through time? 

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How dangerous was childbirth in the past?

Thursday, September 19th, 2024

Alice Reid

It is not unreasonable to believe that childbirth in the past was terribly dangerous. This view is common among popular history blogs and even some academic articles. Several internet sources, when discussing maternal mortality, state that in medieval or early modern times, as many as one in three women died during their childbearing years. 

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Three score and ten?

Thursday, August 15th, 2024

Romola Davenport & Jim Oeppen

Campop’s studies of mortality suggest that, in England, average life expectancy at birth varied between 35 and 40 years in the centuries between 1600 and 1800It is a common misconception that, when life expectancy was so low, there must have been very few old peopleIn fact, the most common age for adult deaths was around 70 years, in line with the Biblical three score years and ten. So what does life expectancy actually measure?

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