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Archiver > GENBRIT > 1998-11 > 0910033177


From: <>
Subject: Re: Longevity
Date: 2 Nov 1998 10:59:37 -0800


The Rev. Stephen T.Moseling wrote:
>
> > Having been prevented by the rain from doing much needed work in the garden
> > this afternoon, I spent the time going through some fiches of 17th/18th
> > century records for St.Mary's Dover.
> >
> > We are told that people live longer nowadays, but I came across the
> > following entry:
> >
> > Burial: 13th October 1728. The widow Franke aged 100 and three years eleven
> > months.
> >
> > Can anyone better this?

IN the churchyard at Bolton-on-Swale, near Richmond in North
Yorkshire, is apparently an obelisk which records the death on
December 6th 1670 of a local man, HENRY JENKINS - aged 169!
Reputedly, at the age of 162 Henry said he could remember Henry VIII
and the Battle of Flodden Field (1513). Henry said he was 12 at the
time, that the King was away in France and that the Earl of Surrey
was general, and he (Henry) recalled taking a cartload of arrows to
Northallerton for collection by the English soldiers. Henry's
statements about the king being away in France and the Earl of Surrey
being in command of the English army were historically correct.

At Manfield on the Yorkshire side of Teesdale the graveyard contains
the grave of a woman who was still working on a local farm at the age
of 108 and at Wragby, near Wakefield, is a monument to one Sarah
Mellard, who died in 1842 after serving as a maid at Nostell Priory
for an amazing 83 years.

These tremendous instances of longevity took place in Yorkshire, so
they must be true!

* Murders & Mysteries from the Yorkshire Dales, by Peter N. Walker.

My own gt-grandfather (1806-1896) lived to be 90 (fully
documented) after spending most of his life in the squalid, fetid
city of Bradford. where the average expectation of life at one stage
in Victorian times was 18. This figure, of course, is somewhat
distorted by the huge child mortality rate, but even so the life
expectancy for adults was probably no more than about 45-50.

Lancelot Yellow in North Yorkshire

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