So many ways to die, so many choices! Life expectancy was not generally over 40 years, with so many options.
Childbirth could take out two lives at once, and it often did.
Infectious disease removed perhaps the largest number, including infants under one year. Of course, epidemics shot these numbers up. The most famous epidemic is the Black Death, but there were many more: St. Anthony’s Fire, measles, smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. Other infectious diseases just hung around chronically, like malaria and tuberculosis.
Work-related accidents ranged from falling off scaffolding to slipping at a river bank while washing clothes. English records typically noted the manner of death; a modern scholar calculated that most people died very near to, or at, home. Women and children drowned in unwalled wells, while men often died by trees falling on them. Of course, war and tournaments took out professional warriors, though a surprising number of them survived their wounds with simple surgical care.
For those who lived to old age, cancer was always waiting. At least for a time, long enough to name the disease, cancer was viewed as the work of microscopic crabs eating away the flesh.
Let’s not forget famine and floods, either. In the early 1300s, a series of disastrous weather patterns (probably global cooling plus a North Atlantic regional disruption) dumped far too much rain on Northern Europe. Holland flooded badly several times, killing thousands. And across the region, crops failed as many as seven years in a row, a famine of (literally) Biblical proportions.
Death was part of life. Everyone had been exposed to death so much that it wasn’t feared quite the way it is now. Only after the Black Death did society’s collective PTSD create a dark mythology of death. In post-plague art, we see rotting corpses, skeletons and Death literally choking and strangling the unwary, as well as drawing the unwilling into his merry dance.
Post-plague Europe’s PTSD ran very deep. From the shock of losing nearly half the population (in some places more, some less) in just a year and a half, people became both more devout and less devout, more pious and more occultic, more immoral and more moralistic. PTSD led to greater pomp for funerals and then, eventually, to the Protestant Reformation. People were no longer willing to let the monks and priests live out salvation on their behalf. They wanted to know where their souls would go after death.
Many modern funeral customs developed during this period. In this next mini series, we’ll cover pagan and early Christian burials and then later medieval funeral pomp, through the royal shows that gave us some of our current customs.