At Home - Bill Bryson [181]
Even without the unnerving interventions of surgeons, there were plenty of ways to die in the premodern world. For the City of London, the death rolls—or Bills of Mortality as they were known in England—for 1758 list 17,576 deaths from more than eighty causes. Most deaths, as might be expected, were from smallpox, fever, consumption, or old age, but among the more miscellaneous causes listed (with original spellings) were:
choaked with fat 1
Itch 2
froze to death 2
St Anthony’s fire 4
lethargy 4
sore throat 5
worms 6
killed themselves 30
French pox 46
lunatick 72
drowned 109
mortification 154
teeth 644
How exactly “teeth” killed so many seems bound to remain forever a mystery. Whatever the actual causes of death, it is clear that expiring was a commonplace act and that people were prepared for it to come from almost any direction. Death rolls from Boston in the same period show people dying from such unexpected causes as “drinking cold water,” “stagnation of the fluids,” “nervous fevers,” and “fright.” It is interesting, too, that many of the more expected forms of death feature only marginally. Of the nearly 17,600 people whose deaths were recorded in London in 1758, just 14 were executed, 5 murdered, and 4 starved.
With so many lives foreshortened, marriages in the preindustrial world tended to be brief. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the average marriage lasted just ten years before one or the other of the partners expired. It is often assumed that because people died young they also married young in order to make the most of the short life that lay in front of them. In fact, that seems not to be so. For one thing, people still saw the normal span of life—one’s theoretical entitlement—as the biblical three score years and ten. It was just that not so many people made it to that point. Nearly always cited in support of the contention that people married early are the tender ages of the principal characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—Juliet just thirteen, Romeo a little older. Putting aside the consideration that the characters were fictitious and hardly proof of anything, what is always overlooked in this is that in the poem by Arthur Brooke on which Shakespeare based the story, the characters were actually sixteen. Why Shakespeare reduced their ages is, like most of what Shakespeare did, unknowable. In any case, Shakespeare’s youthful ages are not supported by documentary evidence in the real world.
In the 1960s, the Stanford historian Peter Laslett did a careful study of British marriage records and found that at no time in the recorded past did people regularly marry at very early ages. Between 1619 and 1660, for instance, 85 percent of women were nineteen or older when married; just one in a thousand was thirteen or under. The median age at marriage for brides was twenty-three years and seven months, and for men it was nearly twenty-eight years—not very different from the ages of today. William Shakespeare himself was unusual in being married at eighteen, while his wife, Anne, was unusually old at twenty-six. Most really youthful marriages were formalities known as espousals de futuro, which were more declarations of future intentions than licenses to hop into bed.
What is true is that there were a lot more widowed people out there and that they remarried more frequently and more quickly after bereavement. For women, it was often an economic necessity. For men, it was the desire to be looked after. In short, it was often as much a practical consideration as an emotional one. One village surveyed by Laslett had, in 1688, seventy-two married men, of whom thirteen had been married twice, three had been married three times, three married four times, and one married five times—all as the result of widowhood. Altogether about a quarter of all marriages were remarriages following bereavement, and those proportions remained unchanged right up to the first years of the twentieth century.
With so many people dying, mourning became a central