Month: April 2019

Originally published at Forbes.com on April 24, 2019.

 

Viewers and readers of Game of Thrones/A Song of Fire and Ice are no doubt familiar with the phrase used when a man of the Night’s Watch passes, just as much as will have heard/read the vow of the Night’s Watch (available online at Wikiquote.org):

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. . .

which viewers/readers were first introduced to in season/book one.  Now it’s season 8 of Game of Thrones, and everyone is speculating about who will end up on the Iron Throne, and who will die along the way.

And while it may be true that not “all men must die” (as the phrase Valar morghulis translates to from the book’s invented High Valyrian) early, untimely and violent deaths, and, indeed, though there are scattered old characters on the show, both nobles and poor longsuffering peasants, one imagines that it was rare to live to old age in both this fictional version of a medieval world, and in the actual past of the Middle Ages.

What’s more, I suspect that most of us, knowing the life expectancy of even a century ago was so much lower than in our modern times, imagine that “retirement” and “retirement planning” simply didn’t exist until the twentieth century.  In the Middle Ages (and in Europe specifically, since the markers of the Middle Ages weren’t relevant elsewhere), life expectancy at birth was on the order of 33 years old (see Our World In Data for more premodern life expectancy data) –which certainly suggests that no one lived to what we now consider “retirement age”!  Like the men of the Night’s Watch, you work (or battle) until you die.

But if fictional Westeros were like medieval or early modern Europe, it was actually the deaths of infants and children which was the greatest contributor to low life expectancy, and improved treatment of childhood diseases and better understanding of public health (that is, the provision of clean water) which brought about the greatest degree of increase in life expectancy.  For individuals who made it past childhood, it would not have been unusual to live to something close to what we think of as “old age,” an age, which according to Barbara Hanawalt’s The Ties That Bound, a study of family life among medieval English peasants (1986), was perceived of as being about age 60 (p. 228).  Hanawalt cites estimates that a not-inconsiderable portion of the population reached that age; while there are no census records, she reports,

Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parish registers show that roughly 8 to 16 percent of the population was over sixty.  And in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscany 6 to 15 percent of the rural population was over sixty.

What’s more, in Europe, the nuclear family was not just a modern invention but stretches much further back, which meant both that young couples waited until comparatively later ages to marry, in order to be independent financially, and that older couples did not simply expect their children to provide for them as would have been the case in other cultures where all generations lived together in a single living quarters/family compound in which elders were cared for.  As a result, those who reached old age needed some sort of retirement provision rather than simply taking it for granted that they would be cared for by the next generation.

So how did people live once they were too old to continue to work?  For the poor, there aren’t always historical records to tell us, but there are, at any rate, two interesting parallels between retirement in the Middle Ages and our own times, as some oldsters used the equity in their homes to finance their retirement and others purchased annuities.  Of course, these are modern ways of expressing medieval approaches, but they still describe what occurred.

What I’ve labelled “using the equity in their homes” is what Hanawalt calls the “retirement contract,” an agreement between the aging peasant or peasant-couple and a child, other relative, or wholly unrelated person looking to get started in life.  Hanawalt writes,

these contracts provided that the retiring peasant would relinquish the use of his buildings and lands in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing from the person, whether a kinsman or not, who took up the contract.

Some instances of such contracts in the records describe the precise amounts of food and clothing to be provided.  Additions to houses might also be built in which the newly-“retired” couple would live, or the medieval equivalent of a “granny flat,” though sometimes they would be relegated to climbing a ladder to an attic or loft.  Of course, more well-to-do peasants could bargain for better provisions, and small landowners, or cottars, would be obliged to promise that

all of their household equipment, clothing, and other movables would go to the person who agreed to provide for them in their old age.

One might also guess that a young person would expect a lower “price” for supporting a poor cottar by undertaking a retirement contract only under circumstances in which that individual was relatively more infirm (and closer to death) than in the case of a better-off peasant landholder.

If the retirement contract was the equivalent of using home (farm) equity, then the “annuity” had its analogue in the purchase of a spot in a hospital.  The concept of a “hospital” at the time was far broader than now, and encompassed not just institutions to care for the sick but also institutions that evolved into almshouses/poorhouses (before these institutions disappeared) and “bedehouses” (in which residents were expected to pray daily for the benefactor), which  cared for the poor and/or served as a retirement home for those who could afford to pay, yes, an Entrance Fee, which would guarantee room, board, and the necessities of life, for one’s life.  The BBC website HistoryExtra explains

The going rate varied over time, between and within hospitals, but at St John’s Hospital in Sandwich most new brothers and sisters paid 6s 8d. (A Margery Warner paid with 1,000 tiles, perhaps floor tiles), whereas at neighbouring St Bartholomew’s the fee to remain at the hospital for the remainder of the inmate’s life might be as high as £19 (the equivalent of around £8,500 today). Although this sounds expensive the new brother or sister might pay in installments and live for several decades at the hospital, expecting in return to receive board and lodging, clothing, shoes, fuel and other necessities, without further payment.

The website Pensionados of the Past, written by the Dutch scholar Jaco Zuijderduijn, provides instances of hospital-retirement homes in the Netherlands.  In one instance, documents from 1573 describe a woman’s woes when certain documents, ruined by water damage, turned out to be financial instruments intended to finance her pending retirement at a hospital in Leiden.  Separately, the author describes a case in Amsterdam:

That living conditions in medieval retirement castles were not always very rosy was also discovered by the woman Katrijn Hilbrant. She retired into Saint Peter’s hospital in 1482, paying the entry fee this required. In 1485 she paid another seven guilders – equivalent to a month’s wages – to be relieved from labour duties. In her own words, she ‘only wanted to sew, weave and spin if she felt like this’.

 Apparently Katrijn did not mind to do textile work once in a while, but not so often as the labour regime in Saint Peter’s hospital prescribed. Based on her account it seems that some of the elderly women were put to work in the hospital’s sweat shop, producing textile that earned the institution some money. Apparently the only way to prevent spending one’s final years in hard labour, and to retire altogether, was simply to pay up.

Of course, besides these “respectable” means of support in retirement, there were plenty of poor elderly who were dependent on charity in villages and cities, and still more who we can assume were supported by their children without any records documenting the fact, but my point is this:  retirement planning is not a new endeavor brought about by a lengthened and even unnatural life span in excess of a normal working age.  The particulars of retirement planning in 2019 are different than they were in 1219, but it is an age-old, not a brand-new concern.

 

 

December 2024 Author’s note: the terms of my affiliation with Forbes enable me to republish materials on other sites, so I am updating my personal website by duplicating a selected portion of my Forbes writing here.