Fleeing the plague
As Halloween in Sydney comes to an end, I thought it would be fitting to find out a little more about death in Tudor England. Luckily, I found a fabulous article written by Professor Peter Marshall of Warwick University and available at Hampton Court’s Website that answered most of my questions.
Even before reading this article I was aware that death plagued the minds of the Tudors more than it does our own today. The lack of sanitation, the presence of a variety of epidemic diseases and the lack of medical understanding and effective medical cures meant that death was everywhere. In his article, Professor Marshall offers us some startling and very sad statistics:
“Average life expectancy in the early sixteenth century was barely thirty, a figure determined largely by heart-breaking levels of infant mortality: 25% of children died before their first birthday, and 50% before their tenth.”
Continue reading here.
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