6. Not everybody died young, with many people during the Middle Ages able to live well into old age.
One of the most frequent perceptions of the Middle Ages is that everybody died young, with a common figure claiming that 9 in 10 people died before the age of 40. Whilst this is arguably true, to an extent, with men born, for instance, between 1276 and 1300, living just an average of 31.3 years, this statistic is also highly misleading. Medicine was notably limited in effectiveness, childbirth routinely proved fatal for women, and everyday illnesses today were terminal to our ancestors. However, it is important to recognize that these figures are simply an average life expectancy during the Middle Ages and are skewed by catastrophically poor infant mortality rates.
Consequently, whilst average life expectancy at birth was merely around 35, this includes those that lived immensely short lives. As many as 25% of children did not reach their fifth birthdays, with an estimated 40% dying before adulthood. As a result, those that did survive until the ages of 18-21 typically lived far longer than their 30s. A male member of the English aristocracy, having reached 21, could reasonably expect to see his late 60s or early 70s between 1200-1550, whilst even peasants could feasibly survive into their 50s and even 60s. The high rate of early childhood deaths manipulates the data to induce a far lower representation of life expectancy than that enjoyed by those who lived in the Middle Ages.