FIFTEEN - The Facts of Life and Death: A Case of Exceptional Longevity

Summary

Introduction

In 1635, during a visit to his properties in Shropshire, Thomas Howard, fourteenth earl of Arundel and Earl Marshall of England, encountered a remarkable blind old man. His name was Thomas Parr (Figure 15.1), and according to common repute, he had been born in 1483. He was thus 152 years old. The principal contemporary source for our knowledge of Parr’s life was the poem (and its prose preface), The Old, Old, Very Old Man, written by John Taylor and published shortly after Parr’s death that same year. According to Taylor, Parr was the son of John Parr of Winnington, born in the parish of Alberbury, Shropshire, and he lived 152 years, 9 months ‘and odd dayes.’ Howard took Parr to London, where he was introduced to the king, Charles I; his portrait was painted by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, and for a few weeks he was an object of considerable popular interest (Taylor records that at Coventry such ‘multitudes’ came to see Parr that he was almost suffocated by the crowds). A few weeks after his arrival in London Parr died; he was autopsied, and his remains buried in Westminster Abbey. As I shall show in this chapter, Parr’s remarkable longevity soon became established as a natural historical and gerontological ‘fact.’ As an almost entirely undisputed truth of potential human longevity, this fact would endure for well over two centuries. Indeed, it was cited as late as the early twentieth century as evidence for what was believed by one Nobel Laureate to be the unnaturally curtailed life spans of modern humans.

By examining Parr’s case in detail and exploring the ways in which his age was established as fact, its penetration into popular consciousness and its endurance over such a long period, I will reveal some of the ways in which a fact can be constructed, how it can travel successfully (temporally, geographically and immutably) in a certain cultural and intellectual climate and how, when changes in that climate ultimately undermine what was once widely thought of as being a statement of truth, such a fact can then cease travelling (at least in so far as it is understood to be ‘true fact’). We shall thus see the kinds of support that enable a fact to be established and become sufficiently stable to travel well, a support process that I label ‘scaffolding.’