Infant and childhood life-span

It has been estimated that about 17% of the population died in infancy, before reaching five years of age. About 16% did not survive to around 20 years of age. In all, more than 33% of the population did not reach adulthood.

Adult life-span

Having reached adulthood, the survival prospects for men and women were very different.

As this chart shows, 50% of adult men died between 21 and 30 years of age and this may be because of warfare and the generally turbulent times. For women, the risks were in pregnancy and childbirth and 35% of them did not survive beyond 30 years.

The 31 to 40 year olds were the ‘middle-aged’ people of the Viking Age and 50 years of age would be thought of as ‘old’.

Women seem to have had an especially high death rate in the age group 41 to 50 when compared with the men, but this is because about eight out of ten of the adult men had already died at an earlier age.

It was exceptional for anyone to reach what we would today call ‘old age’.