skip to primary navigation skip to content
 

 

old people « 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 people’

How scarce were the elderly in the British past?

Thursday, October 10th, 2024

Richard Smith

Eugenio Zampighi, ‘Elderly Couple Reading‘. Beamish, The North of England Open Air Museum.

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? 

Baptisms and burials recorded in English parish registers between 1538 and 1837, when added to information in censuses that become available in the 19th century, enable us to derive an age structure of the population extending from 1541 to the present day.Figure 1 (below) shows the proportion of the population aged 60 and above across almost five centuries of English historyThe elderly as a proportion of the total population ranged between 6 and 10 percent from 1541 until 1931, thereafter experiencing a steady rise to reach 22 percent today. No other country is in possession of a time series of such length. 

The relative roles of fertility and mortality 

It is important to draw a distinction between individual ageing and population ageing. Individual ageing refers to the process of individuals growing older, but our focus here is on the proportion of the total population in old age.   

It may seem counter-intuitive to discover that over a substantial part of the period shown in Figure 1, it has been changes in fertility, and not overall life expectancy, that have been the principal influence on the proportion of the population aged over 60.   

The level of fertility, and to a lesser extent the level of infant mortality, determine the number of persons injected into the base of the population pyramid. These cohorts then move up through the pyramid over time, and their overall size will determine the total age structure. Hence it is not the capacity to survive to ages over 60 that determines the proportion of elderly people, but rather changes in the size of generations available to survive 

Albrecht Durer, ‘An Young and Old Woman from Bergen op Zoom‘ (1520).

Problematic templates for the study of ageing in the past 

It was often claimed that in the deeper past, the elderly possessed a ‘scarcity value’: that because they constituted a particularly low proportion of the population, a favourable attitude existed towards them. Such an idea was fostered by an earlier generation of gerontologists who erroneously took their cue for what they supposed to represent the past from the prevalent situation in predominantly agrarian contemporary societies. 

It was a commonplace in the immediate post-World War II period to find in what were then defined as underdeveloped societies a perceived scarcity of persons over 60, since they then constituted only 3 or 4 percent of the total population. This low proportion may have been historically unique since it was enabled by particularly rapid population growth caused by very high fertility co-existing with significant recent falls in infant mortality. Even the UN at this time was moved to suggest that any country with more than 7 percent of its population over 65 could be defined as having an ‘aged population’.

For much of the 19th century, the English elderly made up just a little over 6 percent of the population – the lowest sustained proportion for the entire period between 1541 and 2021. This relatively low proportion in the Victorian era might be thought a somewhat aberrant period against which to compare later 20th and early 21st century developments in ageing. Through much of this period fertility was high and still uncontrolled. It stands out as a distinctly ‘youthful’ phase in the demographic history of England, and one in which old people were indeed relatively rare 

A bearded old man representing old age. Stipple engraving, 19th century. Wellcome Collection.

As we proceed further back in time, those over 60 certainly were more prevalent, and accounted for slightly more than 10 percent of the population for much of the late 17th and into the early 18th centuries. This relatively high proportion of elderly persons in the population of late Stuart and early Georgian England would not be exceeded until the depression years of the 1930s, because over much of the late 18th and 19th centuries fertility was high and population growth unprecedentedly rapid.   

Ageing in England since 1901 

Fertility

For most of this period the impact of fertility decline, which had started in the 1880s, impacted notably on the age structure. The proportion of the population under age 15, which had been 35 percent in 1901, has now halved to 17 percent, and those over 60 have increased by nearly fourfold.

Following the post-World War II baby boom, the total fertility rate fell from 2.8 to 1.7 between 1960 and 1980, reducing the size of the cohorts entering the base of the population pyramid. Although that rate rose after 1980, it did so only slightly, and has been on a plateau in recent years of c.1.9 births, still markedly below the rates found in the immediate post-war years.

While the surge of births in the post-war baby boom temporarily restrained population ageing, survivors from those large birth cohorts are now helping to increase the proportions of those over 60 quite markedly.  

Mortality

Mortality began to fall from the 1870s, but this fall was not shared equally across all age groups. It started in the 1-40 age group and was followed by those under the age of 1 after 1910. By 1950, mortality among persons aged over 60 was still more than 50 percent of what it had been in the decade before World War I. 

John Daubeny, a centenarian, holding a 1 year old boy. Photograph, ca. 1922. Wellcome Collection.

Following World War II, mortality rates among the elderly did experience falls at a greater speed than had occurred over the first half of the 20th century. Significantly, after 1980, the most rapidly increasing life chances were to be found in the oldest age groups, those over 85, leading to substantial growth in the proportional share of the very old. For the first time historically, the elderly share of the population is now being driven by mortality decline among the very oldest​.

Urbanization, migration and the geography of ageing 

In concentrating on the national proportion of those age 60 and over, we are in danger of not taking geographical variations sufficiently into account, and particularly the impact of urbanization. Between 1650 and 1750 the national population showed little growth, staying at c. 5 million. However, over the same period London grew from 400,000 to nearly 700,000. To fuel such expansion, substantial inflows of migrants were required, since the metropolis could not grow on its own accord because of its high mortality, particularly among infants and young children.  

These migration streams, averaging 8,000 persons annually, caused significant rural depopulation, particularly in London’s hinterland, as the emigration of teenagers and young adults created communities in which the elderly substantially exceeded the 10 percent they constituted in the country at large.

This pattern was intensified by the emigration of large numbers, principally of males aged 15-30, to Ireland, the North American Middle Atlantic Colonies and the Caribbean, reaching a total of 400,000 emigrants by the century’s end.  

Emigration of the young continues to contribute to the relatively higher proportion of elderly persons in rural areas today, but the most markedly aged places are now found in coastal locations fuelled by migration of the elderly in their retirement (see Figure 2). 

Figure 2: Geographical variation in the proportion aged 65 and over, and predicted for 2039. Source: Office of National Statistics: ‘Living longer: How our population is changing and why it matters (2018).

The dependency ratio

The social and economic implications of these changes in the age structure are intriguing when account is taken of production and consumption by age. A measure commonly used when investigating this matter is the dependency ratio. We treat the dependency ratio as the number of those aged 15 and under, plus those over 60, per 1,000 people aged 15-59. As the proportions under 15 significantly exceeded those over 60, it was the younger of these two age groups that determined the overall level of dependency until the late 20th century.  

The dependency ratio assumes that children and the elderly consume the same resources as adults, but do not produce resources by working. Since the early 20th century, when full-time education for the young and retirement for the elderly excluded most of these age groups from the work force, this has been largely true.

A woman with knitting in her hands is looking down on a small child in a cart. Process print after H. von Herkomer, 1877. Source: Wellcome Collection.

However, the same cannot be said of the more distant past, and changes in both consumption and working patterns can exaggerate the economic consequences of certain changes in the age structure. For instance, children and old people in the more distant past both consumed less than adults, and many also worked, thereby contributing to production. Variations in the labour-force participation of women add more complications.  

Overall changes in the age structure of the population affected the balance between production and consumption less than is suggested by the dependency ratio alone. 

Ageing and early industrialisation 

Changes in age structure did, however, have significant implications for living standards. The higher the dependency ratio, the greater the negative impact on living standards

Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans, ‘Vieille femme en priere’. Williamson Art Gallery &; Museum.

The younger the population, the greater the proportion of consumption directed to agrarian products needed to meet dietary requirements, and the smaller the proportion produced of non-agricultural goods.

The highest dependency ratio was found in 1826, when it reached 857 in a period of particularly high fertility. The result was that in the first half of the 19th century the ratio of dependents to adults was unfavourable for per capita wellbeing. 

In 1826, those under 15 accounted for 40 percent of population, whereas in 1671 they were only 28 percent. (The lowest dependency ratio was found in 1671, with a ratio of 624 in a period of low fertility and relatively high infant and child mortality.)

The 50 to 75 years before the start of the industrial revolution therefore possessed a favourable age structure for living standards, notwithstanding the relatively high proportions over 60.  

This may help to explain why recent research in Campop has shown the 17th century to have exhibited dramatic declines in the proportion of the male population working in agriculture, and a remarkable growth in the size of the secondary sector. Between 1600 and 1700, at a time when the working population had the fewest dependents, male shares in agricultural employment dropped from 67 percent to 44 percent, and secondary sector jobs rose from 29 to 43 percent of all male employment.  

Social and welfare implications  

While the economic impact of age structural changes in the English past were significant, there were also social implications.   

During the period when the over-60s constituted 10 percent of the population, the burden of care of the elderly would largely have fallen upon the 25-59 age group who then had substantially fewer children to support. This burden of care for the elderly was substantially greater in the late 17th century than in the 19th century, even though the dependency ratio was much lower in the earlier period.

Although many of the old lived as married couples in their own household or alone, very few could have retired completely and often received money from other sources, or care from their children, charities or parish funds as they became increasingly unable to work. 

Jan Gossaert, ‘An Elderly Couple’. The National Gallery, London.

Resources available to support the elderly in the late 17th and early 18th centuries reached a peak when proportions in the elderly age groups were at a maximum but the consolidated claims of the young were relatively low. The elderly were then far from being scarce in number, particularly in rural and small-town communities where the majority of the population still resided. The extent to which a significant resource transfer to the elderly in this period was achieved, whether within the family or from non-familial institutions, will be considered in a forthcoming blog. 

Further reading

Paul Johnson and Jane Falkingham, Ageing and Economic Welfare (Sage, London; 1992). 

Peter Laslett, A Fresh Map of Life: The Emergence of the Third Age 2nd ed. (Macmillan, London; 1996). 

E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1971: A reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 1989), chapter 10. 

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER
And get notified everytime we publish a new blog post.