Who were old in the Middle Ages?

In the Middle Ages, when did old age begin?

a) 50

b) 55

c) 60

d) 65

Granted: this would already be a tough question to answer for the twenty-first century because if we tried to do so, should we understand ‘old age’ as a legal category – the age at which one can retire, or can enjoy senior citizen benefits? As a socio-cultural category – the age at which one is perceived as ‘elderly’? Or should we acknowledge that ‘old age’ is a very personal issue, and highly dependent on an individual’s physical and mental condition – his or her biological age? Or – to make things even more complicated – should we look at individuals’ worldview, as is being done by scholars in geriatrics, who in this respect speak of ‘self-perceived’ or ‘cognitive’ age?

Apart from being a difficult question, it is also one of crucial importance: ‘old age’ demarcates a specific social group of ‘elderly’, that had its own roles in society – varying from grandparents, eminence grises, to elderly poor and many more.

Santi Buglioni (1494-1576), Visiting the sick: Ospedale del Ceppo in Pistoia (ca. 1520-1530).

The question when old age began has been studied by Shulamit Shahar: in a fine article, she investigated when in the Middle ages people were considered ‘old’. Using normative sources, she arrived at varying ages, and concluded that the age of sixty was most commonly used. This was for instance an age at which some office holders were allowed to retire; but such benchmarks are rare and only apply to a very limited number of jobs that included ‘retirement’.

A less often applied method to answering our question, is to focus on the biological age: at what age did the average individual no longer possess the physical or mental capacities to make a living? Such an approach would echo one of the most important benchmarks used today: increasing retirement ages reflect people on average staying healthy until a higher age. There are clues that people in the past experienced a much more rapid biologically process of ageing than today: Robert Fogel’s study into thousands of US army veterans, shows an enormous increase in health when those that were 65 in 1980s are compared to those that were in 1910. This would suggest that the process of biological aging developed quite differently a couple of generations ago, causing people to lose their health much more rapidly.

Of course, it is difficult to determine biological age in the more distant past - or in the future for that matter. The past years, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov have suggested to study old age using a moving benchmark, that takes into account future ‘increases in longevity and health’. One of the methods they developed calculates the beginning of old age by taking all age groups with a life expectancy of 15 years and less. They do so because ‘fixed chronological ages do not work well in evaluating the effect of age structure changes on health care costs’; their approach forecasts improvements in biological age to arrive at at more realistic estimates of old age dependency in the future.

Would it be possible to use a similar method for the past? To investigate this, we use the life tables David Herlihy constructed for the town of Pistoia, in Tuscany, for 1427. In this town, life expectancy at birth was 29,0 years; life expectancy peaked at five years of age (30,9 years), and then began to decline. In Pistoia a life expectancy of 15 years or less was reached at the age of 48.

Of course the benchmark of a life expectancy of fifteen years and less is not necessarily applicable to the biological development of a late-medieval population: we simply do not know at what rate the physical and mental health of the average Pistoian deteriorated. If we go for a – conservative – alternative benchmark of a life expectancy of ten years and less, old age began at 59.

When we proceed with the latter – old age began at 59 – 14% of the population of Pistoia was elderly: on average these people probably coped with physical and mental disabilities that prevented them from making a living. When we use the conventional measure of 65+ years of age, 7% of the Pistoians was elderly (today, in Italy the 65+ group makes up c. 22% of the population).

The point here is: historians may benefit from rethinking benchmarks for old age. Fixed chronological ages do not capture the historical development of the ‘biological age’; the age at which the average person’s physical and mental health deteriorated beyond the point where he or she could live independently from others, is likely to have been lower than today. How much remains the question: answers are likely to be found in interdisciplinary research including bioarchaeology. Until then, answering the question we started with is difficult: perhaps b) 55 is the safest bet for now.

Cited literature:

R. Fogel, The escape from hunger and premature death. Europe, America, and the Third world (Cambridge 2004) 31, table 2.1.

D. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia. The social history of an Italian town, 1200-1430 (New Haven and London 1967) esp. 282-286.

W.C. Sanderson and S. Scherbov, ‘Remeasuring ageing’, Science 329 (2010) 1287-1288.

S. Shahar, ‘Who were old in the Middle Ages?’, Social history of medicine 6 (1993) 313-341.