Preliminary Programme

Today, ‘falls’ are the leading cause of injury-related emergency visits to the hospital for those over 65 years of age. Falling is also the foremost cause of accidental death for the same age group. These incidents are directly attributed to increasing age, cognitive impairment, sensory loss, and medication use. Furthermore, the rate of falling increases significantly with the age of an individual, with falls accounting for 70% of accidental deaths in those over the age of 75.

While there are no sets of similar statistics in early modern Europe, the period’s famously treacherous, winding pie-shaped stairs, the uneven nature of the floors and outdoor paving, the heady mixture of many medicinal recipes, and the age-old problems of ‘old age’ resulted in a world where falls were common and their effects on the elderly serious. Oddly, little to noting has been written about falls and the aged in early modern Europe.

Using the lives and papers of Elizabeth Freke, Ralph Josselyn, Anne Clifford in England, as well as Hermann Weinsberg in Germany, this paper explores how falls changed the lives of the elderly. Falls could signal to the elderly themselves their entry into old age. And, the fear of falling could curtail the activities of the old, causing them to lead a more and more isolated lives. Significant events today, this paper hopes to illustrate the significance of falls in the past. (Show less)

This paper explores the degree to which older women in early modern England understood “health” as a matter of physical mobility. It argues for a range of definitions of mobility from within the household, to urban surroundings, to the rural landscape. Beginning with an examination of seventeenth and eighteenth century conceptions of bodily decay and the decline of physical mobility as part of aging in the religious and medical literatures, this paper will go on to consider the ways in which health, illness, mobility, and confinement were constructed and experienced by women of the middle and upper ranks of society as they aged in in the environments of London, provincial centers, and country estates. (Show less)

Although Ann Messenger’s name was entered without an accompanying age when she first appeared on the workhouse account books of the Liberty of the Rolls parish house in February 1799, by September of that year, we find the age “60” recorded for the old woman, and at the same time, the overseer shifts from referring to her as “helpless” to noting that she had “lost the use of her speech.” The accounts aged Ann Messenger in interesting ways in the ensuing half decade that she spent in the workhouse: one year after she was first listed as 60, she becomes 64 and her “health” is redesignated as “lost the use of her limbs” and then one month later simply as “lame”; she is demoted to the age of 63 in December of that year, and then spends most of 1801 at the age of 60, before being bumped up to 61 in February 1802, and then leaping to 67 from March to August, and finally ending the year having achieved the age of 70, before being demoted again to 67 until her last month, January 1804. In contrast, during that same period, the overseers of Ovenden township, in Halifax, West Yorkshire, kept precise age information for all workhouse inmates, listing not only the year, but the year and month of each inmate’s age every single month for several years.
What are we to make of the bewildering array of ages that are associated with Ann Messenger in this Westminster workhouse account book and of the contrasting obsession with precise age recording in Ovenden? This paper uses workhouse account books, set in the broader context of medical and advice literature, to explore the use and meaning of precise numerical age over the long eighteenth century. I start by correlating “age inflation” (that is the recording of artificially high numerical ages) with sickness and disability, and then move on to a wider discussion of shifts in the overall nature and prevalence of age recording in poor relief documents. While broadly confirming the findings of the existing literature, which states that this period witnessed a growing concern with, and ability to record exact chronological ages, the essay deepens out understanding of both the mechanisms at play, and the function of cultural and social motivations in the use people made of age information, especially as it related to paupers’ health and family situations. (Show less)