(′ōld ′āj)

(geology) The last stage of the erosion cycle in the development of the topography of a region in which erosion has reduced the surface almost to base level and the land forms are marked by simplicity of form and subdued relief. Also known as topographic old age.

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n

Definition: latter part of animate life
Antonyms: adolescence, childhood, infancy, youth

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The final stage in the life course of an individual. Old age is usually associated with declining faculties, both mental and physical, and a reduction in social commitments (including sport participation). The precise onset of old age varies culturally and historically. It is a social construct, rather than a biological stage.

From ancient to modern times in Europe, conceptions of the life cycle that recognized discrete "ages of man" counted old age as one of the stages of life. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) separated life into three stages, and the model of life stages was endowed with additional spiritual meaning in the Middle Ages. By the early modern period, numerous schemes existed to define the steps, ages, or stages of life. Thus, the concept of old age carried with it a relatively coherent set of expectations and experiences including social and cultural signals as well as numerical thresholds of old age. Within these broad socially constructed markers of old age, however, lay a wide variety of experiences determined by social class, gender, and individual life experiences.

Definitions of Old Age

Certain physical signs marked an individual as old: toothlessness, balding or gray hair, hunched back, lameness, deafness. Increasing debility was the clearest signal that one was becoming old. This assumption is clearly visible in both didactic and fictional forms of literature, as well as in visual representations. Shakespeare's representation of the last stage of life in As You Like It as "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything," represents a common trope.

Most communities across Europe also recognized a "green" old age, in which an individual was considered old, but had not lost his or her basic faculties. This stage, though marked by the physical signs of old age noted above, carried with it connotations of social power and continued physical ability. Ballads regarding the life cycle often reveal the key characteristics of life stages. In the English ballad "The Ages of Man" (c. 1775), the earlier stage of old age is depicted as one of gradually failing health: "age did so abate my strength, / That I was forced to yield at length." But also, "My neighbours did my council crave, / And I was held in great request." Thus were continued wisdom and respect associated with green old age. In contrast, the last stage of life was one of advanced physical decay: "At nine times seven I must take my leave / Of all my former vain delight . . . my strength did abate." For women, the first stage of old age may have been signaled by the onset of menopause, but historians disagree about the extent to which menopause served as the transition into green old age.

Chronological markers of old age were recognized as well, and these grew increasingly important and consistent. The age of sixty was widely associated with the onset of old age, but several other ages—especially fifty, sixty-three, and seventy—were also used as thresholds of old age, both by individuals and by those who wrote specifically to classify the ages of life. Still, pension schemes, legal statutes, and individual reflections most often give the age of sixty as a marker for old age in men. Women were more often identified as old while still in their fifties, but the same general rule holds for them as well. Poor-law records and diaries from eighteenth-century England, for example, rarely use the term "old" for women younger than sixty. Late-seventeenth-century government ministers and political arithmeticians used the age of sixty as a dividing point, in both domestic and colonial populations, to designate a portion of the population as too old to bear arms. Such bureaucratic tendencies were part of a more general trend, as some of the groundwork was set for the stricter and more restrictive age norms that grew from the end of the seventeenth century. The increased use of the age of sixty to define entry into old age represents a significant area of discontinuity in the history of old age in early modern Europe.

Life Expectancy

During the early modern period, life expectancy fluctuated dramatically in short-term cycles. In England, life expectancy at birth was 36.8 years from 1550–1599, but fell to 33.9 for the period 1650–1699 before rising again to 36.5 for the last half of the eighteenth century. Still, although average life expectancy at birth seldom rose above the late thirties throughout Europe, individuals who made it through those first precarious years of life could generally expect to live through middle age (that is, their forties).

In France, for example, while life expectancy for women at birth was only 25.7 years in the 1740s, at age twenty, women could expect to live into their mid-fifties. These average life expectancies increased throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century, so that by the 1790s, average female life expectancy at age twenty was 38.6 years. It is also clear that the aged accounted for a significant minority of the population; those aged sixty or more comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of England. These figures are similar to those calculated for early modern France and Spain. In contrast to popular misconceptions, then, the aged were present in significant numbers in pre-modern times.

Attitudes Toward the Old

Strands of veneration for and antagonism toward the aged coexisted in all early modern societies. The extreme views represented by these strands were in constant dialectical tension, underpinning the complex set of social relations that characterized individual older people's relationships within their communities. Historians have moved away from the sense that there is any grand narrative of either rising or declining status for the elderly and have instead highlighted the great heterogeneity and complexity of attitudes toward aging and the aged.

Older individuals often played highly valued roles. The Spanish proverb "The oldster who cannot predict is not worth a sardine" reflects the common perception that an older person's worldly experience was a valuable community resource. Similarly, many different kinds of sources, from diaries to law cases, demonstrate a pervasive reliance on the memory of older individuals as a source of history and custom, a tradition that persisted despite the ever-growing availability and importance of print to record public and private memories.

Attitudes toward old women varied. The image of the wise old woman and the nurturing elderly mother or grandmother played a role in literature, but representations of older women, especially widows, were more often negative, or even vicious. Images in cheap print stereotyped old women as witches, and literature frequently represented old women as lascivious fools, querulous gossips, or shrill scolds. While recent studies have deepened our understanding of the image of the witch as an old woman, the image of the witch as an old hag demonstrates the ways misogyny and antagonism toward the aged could interact in this period.

Assistance to the Aged

Because so much preindustrial work involved physical labor, and because even the middling sorts were often in vulnerable economic situations, old age often brought with it downward economic mobility. Older individuals generally tried to remain self-supporting, and there were expectations of familial aid, but the elderly poor often depended on public assistance. In most European countries, poor relief was not regulated, but individual communities provided assistance for some of their elderly members. Forms of poor relief varied by country, region, and city, but community assistance usually took one of three forms: statutory poor relief, institutions like hospitals and asylums, and charity.

England's "Old Poor Law" serves as the clearest example of statutory poor relief. Under the Elizabethan Poor Acts of 1601, unpaid churchwardens and overseers in each of the country's parishes collected poor-relief taxes and redistributed the money to the poor residents of the parish. The statute specifically called for "necessary relief" to be given to the aged and decrepit poor. Historians differ in their assessment of the scope, generosity, and regional variation of the Old Poor Law's provision for the elderly, but it is certain that this system generated assistance ranging from occasional handouts to subsistence-level pensions for a significant minority of the aged population in many parishes in early modern England. The nature of the assistance changed as poor relief grew more extensive throughout the country. By the end of the eighteenth century, especially in southern and eastern parishes, parish poor relief to the aged could be very extensive. The Old Poor Law provided an important safety net for the aged, especially old widows. This system should not be mistaken for a prototype of modern social security (there was always a very strong and moralistic social-control element to early modern poor relief), but its extensive presence in the economic landscape and cultural expectations of this period is a significant aspect of the history of old age.

In Protestant Germany, large hospitals—charitable institutions set up to serve the aged, young, poor, needy, prostitutes, and so forth—such as those in Hesse, which were founded after the Reformation as a means to replace monastic charity, specifically served infirm people over sixty. If an old person's petition for entrance into the hospital was accepted, he or she could depend on the hospital to provide a bed and subsistence for the remainder of his or her life. Similarly, both the Hospital of Saint Sixtus and the Apostolic Hospital in Catholic Rome privileged the elderly poor as particularly deserving of assistance. Indeed, the early modern period witnessed a growing acceptance of the institutionalization of the elderly in the last stage of life.

In Protestant areas, these institutions were sometimes designed to replace Catholic charities, but in Catholic countries, religious foundations (including monasteries and confraternities) continued to be a vital source of nonfamilial assistance to the aged poor. Less easy to document, but undoubtedly pervasive in both Protestant and Catholic Europe, neighbors, employers, and friends all gave handouts to the aged as well. All of these sources of assistance—formal poor relief, local institutions, and charity—helped the elderly who fell into need maintain themselves in what Olwen Hufton has called the "economy of makeshifts" that characterized the economic lives of the early modern poor.

Household and Family

As they aged, individuals sought to stay closely connected to their children and/or to more extended networks of kin. These relationships were structured around reciprocal obligations and notions of familial bonds and duties as well as around ties of real affection and attachment in many cases. Spouses, especially, gave vital support to one another, and children's duty to support their aged parents was but one strand of the thickly woven thread that bound together the elderly and their families. Resources within families often flowed downward from the aged to the younger generations; in early modern sources, the efforts of the old for their families surface repeatedly and importantly.

Analyses of early modern household listings (informal and sporadic local censuses) have revealed the residential patterns of the elderly, though it is true that such sources can illuminate only a small piece of the broader picture of family life. Both family historians and historians of aging have generated a considerable body of work on the living arrangements of the elderly.

A wide variety of household forms existed throughout Europe. In England, where households were generally small and focused on the conjugal family unit, older men most often continued to head their own households. Even older women lived most frequently as the spouse of a householder or as head of their own domicile until advanced old age. In other parts of Europe, such as southern France, where the stem-family system was prevalent, an older couple's co-residential heir eventually supplanted the parents in home and farm. Historians of central and eastern Europe have found there the prevalence of multigeneration and complex households. In Castile, although most households were nuclear, older people lived in a wide range of household types. One way to make sense of this complexity is to note, as David Kertzer and others have pointed out, that most of western Europe followed a model of nuclear family households, but that older people were fairly often reincorporated into these households, especially after the death of an old parent's spouse.

The heterogeneity of old people's households mirrors the wide variety of experiences and the complex and even contradictory images and expectations regarding old age. An individual's view of old age—whether personal or second-hand—was profoundly influenced by gender, class, health, and family status. Nonetheless, most older people shared a fundamental desire to stay closely attached to their families and friends as they strove to retain their economic self-sufficiency. They also shared, in the broadest terms, a culture that offered many different paths through the aging process, so that individuals were not narrowly restricted to norms of "acting one's age."

Bibliography

Botelho, Lynn, and Pat Thane, eds. Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500. Harlow, U.K., 2001. Botelho's essay focuses on the connection between menopause and old age.

Gray, Louise. "The Experience of Old Age in the Narratives of the Rural Poor in Early Modern Germany." In Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past, edited by Susannah Ottaway, Lynn Botelho, and Katharine Kittredge, pp. 107–124. Westport, Conn., 2002.

Johnson, Paul, and Pat Thane, eds. Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity. London, 1998. A good example of the new trend toward focusing on the heterogeneity of the experience of old age in the past.

Kertzer, David, and Peter Laslett, eds. Aging in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age. Berkeley, 1995. Kertzer's conclusion has a good discussion of nuclear reincorporation.

Ottaway, Susannah. The "Decline of Life": Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, U.K. Forthcoming.

Pelling, M., and R. M. Smith, eds. Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives. London, 1991. A classic work and an excellent bibliographical reference tool.

Rowlands, Alison. "Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany." Past and Present 173, no. 4 (2001): 50–89.

Thane, Pat. Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford, 2000.

Troyansky, David G. Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y., 1989.

Vassberg, David. "Old Age in Early Modern Castilian Villages." In Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past, edited by Susannah Ottaway, Lynn Botelho, and Katharine Kittredge, 145–166. Westport, Conn., 2002.

—SUSANNAH OTTAWAY

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Français (French)
adj. - sur ses vieux jours

idioms:

• old-age pension    (GB, Admin Soc) pension de retraite

Español (Spanish)
adj. - vejez

idioms:

• old-age pension    pensión a la vejez

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