By The Numbers

        For many years climbing out the branches of my ancestor's family trees, one of my basic concepts was that an "average" lifespan for each generation followed an accepted path. The further back in time you went, the shorter duration of existence. When my own grandmother reached the age of 65, she was already set to go to the great beyond. [This was the 1950s!] By my medical school days [ the 1970s] this had reached the age of around 73 years. However, going back in time, length of life would decline in the opposite direction. So, getting the family tree all the way back to around 850 A.D. [Gadforch (JA-1)] it seemed reasonable that most folks lived to around 30 years of age.

       Now, it was somewhat surprising that the folks who started to write their own accounts of the day [Hywel Dda and the guys starting around 850 A.D.] gave their life span at 60 years. What was this all about was my thinking.  Let's see now. How to check this context?

       Well, the text by Mike Ashley, British Kings & Queens, (see post 20 February 2023) gave a window to around this time. The following table is the result of trying to look through the ages.

       The first column lists the individuals named who could be found to have a length of life recorded. The page of each person is given from the text by Ashley where the dates are recorded. The second column shows the years listed for each individual. There were eleven folks (n=11) for a total of 587 years [third column]. The average age for all the folks listed was 53 years! Column four shows calculations for the variance and standard deviation with the standard deviation being 38 years.

        What about that! Sixty years was a good fit. It shows you what I knew about these years long, long ago. But hey, by the numbers, 60 years seems a good number.