old age

Most communities across Europe also recognized a "green" old age, in which an individual was considered old, but had not lost his or her basic faculties. This stage, though marked by the physical signs of old age noted above, carried with it connotations of social power and continued physical ability. Ballads regarding the life cycle often reveal the key characteristics of life stages. In the English ballad "The Ages of Man" (c. 1775), the earlier stage of old age is depicted as one of gradually failing health: "age did so abate my strength, / That I was forced to yield at length." But also, "My neighbours did my council crave, / And I was held in great request." Thus were continued wisdom and respect associated with green old age. In contrast, the last stage of life was one of advanced physical decay: "At nine times seven I must take my leave / Of all my former vain delight . . . my strength did abate." For women, the first stage of old age may have been signaled by the onset of menopause, but historians disagree about the extent to which menopause served as the transition into green old age.

Chronological markers of old age were recognized as well, and these grew increasingly important and consistent. The age of sixty was widely associated with the onset of old age, but several other ages—especially fifty, sixty-three, and seventy—were also used as thresholds of old age, both by individuals and by those who wrote specifically to classify the ages of life. Still, pension schemes, legal statutes, and individual reflections most often give the age of sixty as a marker for old age in men. Women were more often identified as old while still in their fifties, but the same general rule holds for them as well. Poor-law records and diaries from eighteenth-century England, for example, rarely use the term "old" for women younger than sixty. Late-seventeenth-century government ministers and political arithmeticians used the age of sixty as a dividing point, in both domestic and colonial populations, to designate a portion of the population as too old to bear arms. Such bureaucratic tendencies were part of a more general trend, as some of the groundwork was set for the stricter and more restrictive age norms that grew from the end of the seventeenth century. The increased use of the age of sixty to define entry into old age represents a significant area of discontinuity in the history of old age in early modern Europe.