Life expectancy among the male English aristocracy 1200-1745

It is only in the past two centuries where demographics and the development of human populations has emerged as a subject in its own right, as industrialization and improvements in medicine gave way to exponential growth of the world's population. There are very few known demographic studies conducted before the 1800s, which means that modern scholars have had to use a variety of documents from centuries gone by, along with archeological and anthropological studies, to try and gain a better understanding of the world's demographic development.Genealogical recordsOne such method is the study of genealogical records from the past; luckily, there are many genealogies relating to European families that date back as far as medieval times. Unfortunately, however, all of these studies relate to families in the upper and elite classes; this is not entirely representative of the overall population as these families had a much higher standard of living and were less susceptible to famine or malnutrition than the average person (although elites were more likely to die during times of war). Nonetheless, there is much to be learned from this data.Impact of the Black DeathIn the centuries between 1200 and 1745, English male aristocrats who made it to their 21st birthday were generally expected to live to an age between 62 and 72 years old. The only century where life expectancy among this group was much lower was in the 1300s, where the Black Death caused life expectancy among adult English noblemen to drop to just 45 years. Experts assume that the pre-plague population of England was somewhere between four and seven million people in the thirteenth century, and just two million in the fourteenth century, meaning that Britain lost at least half of its population due to the plague. Although the plague only peaked in England for approximately eighteen months, between 1348 and 1350, it devastated the entire population, and further outbreaks in the following decades caused life expectancy in the decade to drop further. The bubonic plague did return to England sporadically until the mid-seventeenth century, although life expectancy among English male aristocrats rose again in the centuries following the worst outbreak, and even peaked at more than 71 years in the first half of the sixteenth century.

仅在近两百年间，人口统计学与人类群体的演进方作为一门独立学科崭露头角，工业化的推进及医学的改进使得世界人口呈现出指数级增长。在十八世纪以前，所知的 demographic 研究寥寥无几，这意味着现代学者不得不借助数百年前的各类文献，以及考古学和人类学的研究成果，以期对世界人口发展史获得更为深入的理解。家谱记录：其中一种方法是研究过去的家谱记录；幸运的是，有许多关于欧洲家族的家谱可以追溯到中世纪时期。然而，遗憾的是，所有这些研究均涉及上流社会和精英阶层；这并不能完全代表整体人口，因为这些家庭的生活水平远高于普通民众，且相较于普通民众，他们更不易受到饥荒或营养不良的侵袭（尽管精英阶层在战争时期死亡的可能性更大）。尽管如此，从这些数据中仍有诸多可资借鉴之处。黑死病的影响：在1200年至1745年间的数百年里，英格兰男性贵族若能活到21岁，一般预期寿命在62至72岁之间。在这一群体中，唯一一个预期寿命显著较低的世纪是13世纪，黑死病导致成年英格兰贵族的预期寿命降至仅为45岁。专家们推测，十三世纪的英格兰在瘟疫之前的总人口约为四至七百万，而十四世纪则降至两百万，这意味着英国因瘟疫至少失去了半数的人口。尽管瘟疫在英格兰的高峰期仅持续了大约十八个月，即1348年至1350年之间，但它对整个社会造成了毁灭性的打击，此后几十年的疫情爆发进一步降低了十年的预期寿命。淋巴腺鼠疫在17世纪中叶之前偶尔会重返英格兰，尽管在此之后几个世纪中，英格兰男性贵族的预期寿命再次上升，甚至在16世纪上半叶达到71岁以上的峰值。