skip to primary navigation skip to content
 

 

old age « 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 ‘old age’

Were all workhouses Dickensian? Indoor relief under the Old Poor Law (1601-1834)

Thursday, January 9th, 2025

Jeremy Boulton and Samantha Williams 

Ask most people about workhouses, and they will probably associate them with Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-8); that is, with grim Union Workhouses erected under the New Poor Law (1834) which supposedly produced segregated, oppressive, regimented institutions designed to deter all but the most desperate from applying for poor relief.  

(more…)

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? 

(more…)

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?

(more…)

« Home
  • Recent posts

  • Pages

  • Archive

  • Tags

  • age at childbirth agricultural revolution coal contraception death demographic transition demography doctors economic history energy English peasants Europe family history family size family tree famine fertility fossil fuels genealogies households illegitimacy industrial revolution marriage medieval migration mortality naming practices non-marital fertility north-south divide occupational structure occupations old age organic economy plague poor laws population size serfdom social history surnames towns and cities urbanisation women's employment women's history women's wages women's work