Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End
This is the second part of our series (I) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. As we’ve discussed, pre-modern peasant farmers make up the vast majority of human beings in in the past.1 Last week we started by looking at the basic building blocks of peasant society: the household and the village. We noted that rather than organizing as individuals, pre-modern people generally and peasant farmers in particular, organized as households, a single economic unit based around a residence and landholding, which included both kin and non-kin members. Those households were then organized into villages, with each household often having scattered land holdings in different parts of the village’s farmland.
In this part and the next, I want to get into some of the demographic patterns that shape the life of these pre-modern farmers. While cultural practices differ quite a lot between different people in the past, the mortality and fertility regime that shaped the life of pre-modern farmers tended to be quite consistent between different pre-modern societies – at least to the degree that they are so radically different from conditions now. This week, we’re going to begin at the ending, with mortality patterns, because they provide necessary foundational context for all of the other demographic patterns. The pattern of mortality among pre-modern people doesn’t exist that far in the past – everyone lived and died like this through the 1700s – but is so different from our experience today as to be profoundly alien to us. It isn’t just that people lived shorter lives in the past, but that the structure of mortality and the expectations it created were different.
Naturally, I should note then before we head in, that this post is going to involve some pretty frank discussions of death – mostly from a statistical angle – including child and maternal mortality. I’ve also included some images of death-related artwork to help anchor the reader’s thinking about the culture of death in these societies. That may be somewhat distressing (I suppose it certainly ought to be), so read at your discretion.

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Death By the Numbers
It may seem odd to start with death, since after all that is normally the end of a story rather than the beginning. But if we want to understand the structure of life in pre-modern conditions, we really do need to start with death because mortality is, in practice, the ‘forcing function’ of a lot of how life is organized in peasant communities and the pre-modern world more generally. In particular the pattern of mortality of pre-industrial life combined with drive to sustain population functionally mandate certain family patterns among the vast majority of the population, which in turn drive labor patterns. This is particularly true for the peasantry: we often do see upper-classes in pre-modern societies fall below population replacement, but that is no real problem for the society, because there is an effectively infinite supply of people from the lower orders perfectly happy to ‘move up’ into the aristocracy.2 By contrast, there is no ‘reserve’ population to replace the peasantry (understood here to include enslaved agricultural laborers) – instead it is their population growth which sustains the other social orders. So high mortality forces high fertility.
Of course that’s not quite how the causation picture works: high fertility is the result of human choices (and they are, as we’ll see choices), but high mortality rates limit the range of fertility patterns capable of producing a stable population, not quite down to a single point, but to a sufficiently narrowly constricted range at the upper-end of possible fertility. A society which moved out of this range at the lower end would rapidly shrink, creating space for societies (or families within a society) which maintained higher fertility. In practice, this doesn’t result in some sort of ‘rising and declining civilizations’ that one sometimes sees discussed in moralizing, largely a-historical ‘class of civilization’ terms, but rather a situation where all societies put a pretty high value on childrearing and so, absent serious disruptions which prevent it, maintain steady, modest growth at the upper-end of the fertility range, with only modest variation. Again, that range isn’t a point – there are some different marriage and family formation patterns – but that range exists in the context of a mortality regime which is functionally unchanging for all pre-modern societies.
And I want to be clear and reiterate that last point, because it is the other reason we’re starting with death: the basic pattern of pre-modern mortality changes very little from one society to another or from one pre-industrial era to another. It also varies very little from one class to another: the fantastically wealthy aristocracies of pre-modern and early-modern societies could buy many fantastical things, but nothing they could spend money on would do much to preserve their children from shockingly high child mortality rates (they may have been somewhat better at surviving longer in adulthood, but only marginally). Until the 1700s, no society’s medicine could meaningfully change the pattern either. The major features of mortality are thus constant in a way that very few things are truly constant in studying historical societies.

So what were the patterns? This is a point where the way we walk about pre-modern mortality tends to skew people’s understanding, because the statistic we lead with is life expectancy at birth (note that we’re not dealing with stillbirths or miscarriages this week). What you’ll hear is “life expectancy [at birth] was around 24 – somewhat higher for females, somewhat lower for males.” And that’s more or less true – the exact figure will wobble around depending on the society and the data set, but never gets far from the mid-twenties – but can be somewhat deceptive. I remember realizing that someone had fundamentally misunderstood something when I was playing Children of the Nile and when your ruler turns 20 or so, the game informs you that you are old and must think constantly about death. But obviously a 20-year-old – peasant or aristocrat – did not think death was right around the corner, because it usually wasn’t. Instead, that basic life expectancy figure is the product of a set of more complex interactions.
We can think about these patterns through demographic modeling: we take the ancient or medieval data we have and look for a modern demographic model (often based off of the study of populations in developing societies) that fits the patterns we see. The standard such model for the ancient world is Model West, usually L3, from Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (1983),3 because it fits the data out of Roman Egypt fairly well. One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.

What is going on here is the substantial impact of absolutely staggering infant and child mortality. Under these assumptions, by age 10, fully 50% of all children born are already dead; only about 45% of all children make it to adulthood as we generally define it (around 18 years). And as a reminder that is only for live births – we have not yet considered miscarriages, stillbirths or maternal mortality. This enormous child mortality rate is not an accident of a particular ancient society, but in fact an absolute constant for all pre-industrial societies, be they hunter-gatherers, pastoralists or farmers, be they urbanized or not, ‘civilized’ or not, ‘western’ or not. For all societies, everywhere at every time before about 1750 (and in most places for a long time after that) it was simply a fact of life that half, HALF of all children died. Our World in Data produced a famous chart of this ( released under CC-BY which I can just put here:

Youth mortality (deaths before age 15 or so) in modern developed countries today is a fraction of 1%; even poor developing countries are below 10% in all but the worst cases (the global average is 4.3%). That shift is, of course, part of the broader ‘demographic transition,’ which perhaps we’ll talk about one day, but I want to stress it here because it is one of the most striking ways in which “the past is a foreign country,” although in this case the past is even more alien than any foreign country on earth.
Adult mortality patterns can vary a bit more based on the society in question and by conditions, but the basic outline of mortality rates remains fairly constant. Generally early adulthood brought with it two major mortality ‘filters’ – despite young adults being the least vulnerable to sickness and such – military mortality (mostly for men) and maternal mortality (entirely for women). Military mortality for our peasants, as you might imagine, varied quite a bit based on society. In some societies, the peasantry was substantially demilitarized, ruled over by a warrior-aristocratic class that did much of the fighting or protected by a professional military class and so we might expect military mortality among the peasantry to be very low. On the other end of the spectrum, Nathan Rosenstein4 estimates that military mortality may have claimed something like a third of all Romans who served during the third and early second centuries BCE – and as we’ve discussed, nearly all Roman males served, at least in periods of high military demand. I should note that there are a lot of complications in this data, so take that military mortality rate as something like an absolute upper-bound.5
Casualties from pitched battles might average around 10% of all combatants,6 so a male peasant population that served as a militia in these sort of battles, like Greek hoplites (who are probably just the upper third or so of peasants, wealth-wise) might lose something like 4.5% of a male birth cohort (remember that child mortality) on average in a pitched battle. If we assume that a given age cohort might fight 2 or 3 such battles in their lifetimes, which seems a reasonable guess, we might expect something like 10-12% of the relevant military class’ birth cohort to die in battle. If I’m right in guesstimating that the hoplite class represented the upper third or so of the farming population (the rest being too poor or enslaved) we might suppose battle casualties would have consumed around 4-5% of the whole society’s male birth cohort. Expressed another way, that would mean that 10% of all males surviving to adulthood would perish in combat.7 Rosenstein estimates the average combat mortality rate of Roman legions during the Republic – legions that tend to win rather a disproportionate amount of the time – at around 5.6%.8 In short, for societies that field mass conscript armies, military mortality is a significant factor, but pales in comparison to child mortality. Under these conditions, individual battles or wars will almost never be demographically significant (that is, cause noticeable change in population) because casualties are a fairly small subset of the fairly small subset of men who serve. However, the sustained pressure of such warfare might male-shift a society slightly and lead to altered family patterns.

The other factor for young adult mortality, pertaining in this case to women was maternal mortality (death as a result of childbirth). This is something of a tricky topic because there is a tendency to substantially overestimate maternal mortality rates in the public imagination, which makes it really tricky to thread the needle of “higher than now but not as high as you think” without giving some sort of false impression. Maternal mortality is expressed as a fraction of live births (which I am going to convert into percents) and seems to have been very roughly in the range of 1-2% for early modern societies, falling to around 0.5% in the 19th century among western societies for which we have good data and then dropping down to its current level among developed countries of 0.25-0.01%. So we generally assume that a pattern of something like 2% maternal mortality is the right ballpark range for the ancient and medieval world, although there must have been variation we can’t see.
Now, 2% doesn’t, perhaps, sound like a lot, but in a society where something like half of all children are dying before adulthood, women are having quite a lot of children simply to maintain population at replacement. We’ll get back around to fertility rates later in the series but for how if we assume each woman in this society is having on average five live childbirths, a 2% chance of death at each stage adds up pretty quickly – a woman who gave birth five times with a 2% chance of dying each time has a total chance of dying at one stage or another of 9.67%, which as you will note is not far off from the chance of dying in a battle (though, contra the House of the Dragon team, who do not appear to understand statistics, it is not that each birth has the fatality of a battle but that a lifetime of births does, which is not the same).
The great remainder of death, the background hum of it, as it were, was from sickness and disease. I should note that this is generally what we mean when we say someone died ‘of old age’ – they were not crushed to death by the prodigious number of candles on their birthday cake, but they merely got quite sick while also being old, the latter factor reducing their ability to handle the former. While in modern society these causes of death tend to be the sort of things – heart failure, cancer – which will kill you at any age but mostly only happen to the very old, in pre-modern societies, the diseases that tear at the elderly population tend to be the endemic infections, fevers, pneumonias and such that the younger adult population might generally survive – age and nutrition diminish the immune response until these sicknesses become lethal at one age or another.
The patterns of these age-and-illness related deaths were markedly seasonal, precisely because they were made lethal by weakness of immunity, which correspond with age but also nutrition. The precise ‘dying season’ varied from one region to the other based on climate and on the timing of key crops. In much of Europe it was the colder months that death stalked whereas in the Mediterranean it was late summer and early fall. Climate is certainly one factor here: individuals with fragile health are more vulnerable to excessive heat or cold temperatures and either can kill.
But another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates plant spring wheat (harvested in fall) and having their dying season in the winter. It’s not hard to see the agricultural cycle at work: harvests are quite variable, ample in some years and short in others. Peasant farmers have all sorts of ways to protect against this risk (we’ll discuss some of them in this series), but a poor harvest still meant belt-tightening and you didn’t wait for the food to run out to begin rationing. So if the harvest was poor, food for children and the elderly has to be limited (the working-age adults cannot be short-changed, they need to be fit enough to plant and bring in the next crop) starting at that harvest and so a few months later when the weather turns bad (too hot or too cold), the already malnourished elderly or very young begin to die. Not of starvation, but of this or that disease or infection which, had they been fully fed, they might have fought off.

That interaction produces something of a balancing effect, assuming agricultural production remains constant: as a population approaches its food production limits, you get more bad years compared to good years and so mortality rises, with the child mortality putting a cap on population growth (along with reducing overall adult life expectancy as older folks pass away earlier). Now this simple interaction is very simple and leads a lot of folks into Malthusian purist thinking, but there are a lot of things that can disrupt this Malthusian interaction, even for peasants – there are a lot of ways for agricultural production to rise modestly enough (increased trade and specialization, bringing more land under crops, better farming techniques, selectively bred crops, etc. etc.) to sustain population growth for a really, really long time and even some very long-settled parts of the world didn’t reach agricultural saturation where basically all useful farmland was in production, until quite late.9
The basic pattern of mortality: massive child mortality, military and maternal mortality for young adults, seasonal mortality for everyone else, combined with the standard background noise of accident, misadventure and crime collectively makes up the mortality picture of the peasant. I should note that there probably is a significant amount of regional and sub-regional variation here we’re not capturing, but the overall patterns here are fairly consistent.10 We’re going to get to the implications that has for the structure of peasant households in just a moment, but first I want to talk about some of the implications for culture and in particular, the culture of death.
Attitudes About Death
While the patterns – very high infant and child mortality, high maternal mortality, strongly seasonal disease-related mortality – are broadly consistent across pre-modern societies, and thus the standard condition of life for our ancient or medieval peasants, the cultural response to this is varied.
The usual mistaken assumption here is to assume that given the high rate of infant and early childhood mortality that parents and society at large was broadly detached from its children. As Patricia Crone points out (op. cit., 116-7) that is simply not the case: while written sources intended for public audiences often assume a polite silence about children lost very young, expressions of agony and grief are far more common in the source material than detachment. Pre-modern peasant parents went through the same cycles of excitement at a welcome pregnancy (and, as we’ll see, most were welcome) and terrible, wrenching loss that modern parents would at the loss of an infant. But people in the past experienced the same feelings we do, even in a far less kind world, something that comes out quite clearly when they do write to us. By way of example, I’m going to include in quote blocks a handful of epitaphs from E.A Hemelrijk’s excellent Women and Society in the Roman World: A Sourcebook of Inscriptions from the Roman West (2021).
To Claudia Fortunata. Claudia Quartilla set this up for her sweetest daughter Julia Foebe, for her mother and Claudius Felix and Claudius Fortunatus for their most dutiful sister. Oh unworthy crime: a mother made a tomb for her daughter! (CIL 9,4255, trans. Hemelrijk)
To the spirits of the departed. For Euposia, who lived for one year, eleven months and seventeen days, and for Zosime, who lived for eight months. Their mother Zoe made [this tomb] for her sweetest children. (IGUR 544 = IG 14,1609, trans. Hemelrijk).
All sorts of cultural practices attest to the person-hood of even very young children, like the Christian practice of infant baptism, performed as early as possible to ensure the salvation of the child’s soul in case – as was very often the case, note above – they didn’t live to adulthood. Likewise, the loving, careful burial of deceased infants and young children is common, including practices like “eaves-drip burial” in medieval Christian cemeteries or the ’emergency’ baptism of stillborn infants in medieval Italy all attest to a deep and profound attachment to children, even those lost extremely young. It wasn’t that peasants cared less, but that they lived in a world with much more grief, albeit that grief might be channeled into non-public expressions or expressions that don’t survive to us.
To the spirits of the departed. Aemilia Donativa lived one year, four months and thirteen days. She lies here. She lived sweeter than a rose. Turbo, her father and Designata, her mother, made this for their daughter. (CIL 8, 16572 = ILAlg 1,3165, trans. Hemelrijk)
To the departed spirit of Cornelia Anniana, our daughter who was already babbling when she was not yet two years old. She lived one year, three months and ten days. The parents made this with their own money for the sweetest daughter. (CIL 14,2482=ILS 8488, trans. Hemelrijk)
On the other hand, that grief was, if not lessened, expected. In these societies, burying children was an expected part of being a parent. Likewise, burying a young wife lost in childbirth was, while not an inevitable expectation, hardly an unheard of thing. That didn’t make it any less impactful. Funeral epitaphs like the following (also from Hemelrijk, op. cit.) are very common:
To the departed spirits and eternal memory of Blandinia Martiola, the most blameless girl who lives eighteen years, nine months and five days. Pompeius Catussa, citizen of the Sequani, a plasterer , set this up for his incomparable wife, who was most kind to him. She lived with me for five years, six months and eighteen days without any foul reproach. He had this made during his lifetime for himself and for his wife and dedicated it under the axe. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo, as I did with my wife. I wish I still could (CIL 13,1983 = ILS 8158, trans. Hemelrijk).
You who pass by, now stand still and linger for a while. Read the misfortune of a mourning man. Read what I, Trebius Basileus, her grieving husband, have written so that you may know that the writing below comes from the heart. She was adorned with all good things, unoffending to her dear ones, guileless, a woman who never committed any wrongdoing. She lived twenty one years and seven months and bore me three sons, whom she left behind when they were small children. Pregnant with her fourth child, she was died in the eighth month. Stunned, now examine the initial latters of the verses and willingly read, I pray, the epiath of a well-deserving woman. You will recognize the name of my beloved [Grata] wife. (CIL 6, 28753, trans Hemelrijk; the Latin forms an acrostic spelling out the name of the deceased, Veturia Grata).
That said the expectation meant that the social script around death in these societies was generally very strong. Cultural practices around mourning, burial (or cremation) and memory varied substantially, but anyone growing up to adulthood in a peasant village was likely to have experienced quite a lot of funerals and so while death wasn’t any less sad, it was processed to a degree as a ‘normal’ part of life rather than a sudden disruption of it.

All via the British Museum these mummy portraits are:
Top Row (starting from the left): inv. EA74715, dated 100-120AD; EA 74718, dated 80-100AD; EA74704, dated 150-170 AD, all from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt.
Bottom Row (from the left): EA63396, early second century from Rubaiyat, Egypt, EA 63396, early second century from Rubaiyat Egypt and EA74707, 70-120 AD, from Hawara in the Faiyum, Egypt. All six are now in the British Museum.
This isn’t the place for me to go into every sort of death ritual for every pre-modern peasant culture because there are too many and I don’t know them all. But I do want to note some common features that show up frequently (but not universally). One of the most striking is that funerary rituals often focus substantially on the continuing place of the deceased in the community. We’ll come back around to this, but, as Crone observes repeatedly, pre-modern societies were markedly less individualistic than most modern societies, understanding individuals primarily as parts of a household, a family, a community rather than as individuals. That didn’t change when those individuals died.
So, for instance, in addition to the remarkably individualistic tombstone inscriptions above (the Romans are, as ancient cultures go, unusually individualistic in their outlook), the Romans believed that, after the standard nine-day period of mourning, funeral procession and burial that the spirit of the deceased became part of the di manes, (the ‘divine spirits’). The ancestor spirits watched over the family and community but also remained very much a part of it. Nine days after the death of the deceased, the Romans would hold another funeral feast which would include an offering to the di manes, of which the deceased was now a part. Likewise, of course, in medieval Christian contexts (both Catholic and Orthodox) the deceased were to be buried (if baptized) in consecrated ground to await the resurrection of the dead. This too represented not an exit of the individual from the community but rather something closer to a changing of their position in it: from the active, living part of the community to the waiting, expectant part. Ancient Egyptian belief represented the afterlife as a continuation of the living world, with individuals assuming the same roles in death as in life, while the remembrance and offerings of the living family of the deceased sustained their spirit another form of a continuation of the individual’s place in the community.
There is a tendency in this context, I think, for moderns to jump to asking, ‘well, what if the community ceases to exist, or many centuries pass and this memory is lost?’ And I’m not going to say no one ever had that idea, but by and large I think that is a very modern view that understands the world as impermanent and changing in a way that most pre-modern societies do not. From the perspective not just of the peasant, but also the peasant’s priest, humans are impermanent, fleeting things but the world, its structure and rhythms, its communities and families, these are far more permanent and lasting. This is a pre-modern world, after all, that changes slowly, often imperceptibly slowly, with children coming to inhabit the exact roles, working the same land, living in the same houses, as their parents, one generation after another. At least to my sense, planning for a radically different world 10,000 years in the future sits largely outside the pre-modern worldview which imagines that the world doesn’t change much and at most goes through a series of repeating cycles.
Implications for Households
The mortality pattern as laid out here has a few implications for the shape of the peasant households we see and the sort of families they form. We’re going to walk through some of these in more detail in the next part where we talk about nuptiality and fertility (marriage and babies) but I want to note some of the high points here.
First a high proportion of these societies at any given time were children, even by their standards of childhood (often ending between 15 and 17, not at 18). Generally about half of the population at any given time under this mortality regime is going to be age 15 and below, whereas for a modern population close to replacement that figure is going to be 20-25%. Children were thus socially omnipresent in a way that they simply aren’t in any modern industrial society (but are in some developing countries).
Equally, for societies with very low productivity the demand to feed that population means that pre-modern cultures do not have a ‘childhood’ as we understand it, as an extended vacation from work and adult life. Children were instead working in whatever capacity they were physically able as soon as they were physically able because these societies simply lacked the resources to support half of the population on a non-working basis (which is also going to be true when it comes to labor and gender, but we’ll get to that later in the series). This, of course, was especially true for our peasants, at the bottom of the society, whose work was necessary for its basic subsistence, but one gets the sense that childhoods were short and transition into work was common even among the higher rungs of society – for instance the age for an elite boy to become a page attending a knight was seven.
This mortality regime also has implications for the ‘cycle’ that households went through. After all, if a married couple began having children in their late teens and continued doing so through their twenties (which they would have to do simply to make replacement; we’ll talk more about this next time), by the time their last children would be coming of age, the parents would be into their late thirties or early forties and a casual glance at the graph way up above will tell you that many of those parents are, at that point, living out their last years. Under the assumptions of that Model West L3 life table, at the start of reproductive age, the life expectancy – which is to say the point at which we’d expect half of the cohort to have passed away – for women was around 50 and for men around 48. So most children would reach adulthood while their parents were still living, but equally most children would lose their parents while their own children were very young. That interaction is further influenced by marriage patterns (particularly differential ages at first marriage), which we’ll talk about subsequently.
But the result is that while these households are often ‘multigenerational,’ and (as we’ll see) marriage and reproduction often begin very early, ‘three’ is generally the maximum generations that are alive at one time and even then usually not for very long. That also helps explain cultures where young men were expected to have property in order to marry and establish a household – the expectation is not that they are acquiring land (extremely hard to do in these societies) but rather that inheriting land is what will make them viable marriage partners (again, that differential age at marriage). Under this mortality regime, a young man in his early 20s probably does not have to wait very long to inherit the farm (especially because his father likely also married somewhat later in life).
Finally, and this will set up the next part of this series, it should already be obvious that the fertility regime this level of mortality demands in order to avoid the population shrinking into nothing in just a few generations is going to be one of very high fertility: simply maintaining population under conditions where half of all children die before adulthood and many adults die early in adulthood (especially women dying in childbirth) is going to necessitate a lot of children.
And that’s where we’ll turn next: marriage, family formation and childbearing (but not rearing just yet).