Before and after

Let us first take a look at the birth and death columns which appear regularly in our newspapers: most of the announcements are to do with elderly people; there are some deaths of young adults or children, of course, usually the victims of accidents, but the typical announcement is that of the funeral of a widow of about 80, attended by two of her children and about four or five grandchildren. We have hardly any similar evidence for the sixteenth century, with the exception of a few family records, but by using the method of family reconstitution we could find analogous cases. To leave behind one or two children and four or five grandchildren, if one was lucky enough to live to 80, was not unusual.

At first sight, there seems to be little difference in the composition of families and in the kinship relations: in the sixteenth century, as in the twentieth, the dominant type is the nuclear family, made up of father, mother and children. The gap between generations has not changed much either: about twenty-five to thirty years, as a result of a relatively high age of marriage; western Europe has never known adolescent marriage: in India, in 1891, the average age of girls on marriage was only 12½, while in western Europe it was as high as 23.

The maximum life span has not changed much either: in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth, this does not exceed 115 years; and the reported cases of extreme old age owe more to the lack of official records or to general ignorance, than to the quality of life or the progress of medical science.