#7 Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages is NOT what you think!
So, let’s start with the mortality rate of babies in the Middle Ages. When we talk ‘life expectancy’ historians have always included infant mortality. The infant mortality rate was somewhere between 30% and 50%. These figures include the high number of infants who died within days after birth from little-understood and wholly unpreventable illnesses that modern science has thankfully overcome. High infant mortality has created the myth of most eras having a lower life expectancy than us twentieth-century people. The reality was that if a person lived to their 18th birthday, they had a good chance of living 50 more years from that point. 78 years is not a bad age to live to.
#6 People had horrible table manners, throwing bones and scraps on the floor.