The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.(Source: BBC)
In short, if a male living in 1500 managed to see his 21st birthday, he was expected to live around 30 more years. It was so because, infants and children died at a horrific rate (some say up to 1/3 of all died before the age of 5).
In more details:
Different class of people had different life expectancy.
Life expectancy at birth was 33 years by the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, the average life span of males born in landholding families in England was 31.3 years and the biggest danger was surviving childhood. Once children reached the age of 10, their life expectancy was 32.2 years, and for those who survived to 25, the remaining life expectancy was 23.3 years. (Source: International Journal of Epidemiology)
Among royalty, the mean life expectancy for women was 43.6 years, with a median of 42/43; for men, it was a mean of 48.7 and a median of 48/49. The mean life expectancy of kings of Scotland and England, reigning from 1000 A.D. to 1600 A.D. were 51 and 48 years, respectively. Their monks did not fare as well. In the Carmelite Abbey, only five percent survived past 45. (Source: Sarah Woodbury)
Between 1200–1599 and 1600–1900, median age of death was 77.0 (69.0–82.5) for Popes, and 70.0 (60.0–79.0) for church artists. ( (Source: International Journal of Epidemiology) Being born into a family of wealth or status did not guarantee a long life either. In ducal families in England between 1330 and 1479, for example, one third of children died before the age of five.
Causes:
If you were born during the Black Plague, you average life expectancy would be 2 years.
People in the medieval times died of a long list of causes, including famine and food shortages, animal attacks (not just bears and wolves, but also pigs and cows), violence (both bandits and knights killed people frequently, often they also beat each other to death), child birth, disease (dysentery, sweating sickness, St. Anthony’s fire, gonorrhoea, malaria, leprosy, measles, child-bed fever, small pox, tuberculosis, typhoid, syphilis etc. ), falling and drowning, poisoning and drinking, and cold (their homes and clothes were highly inefficient).
The Black Plague (50 million people dead) and wars, including the Crusades (3 million adults dead) killed of a large number of people to bring down the overall numbers.
Beyond Europe:
The highest life expectancy in the world was enjoyed by Muslim Spain, estimated to be 62 years, followed by people of trans-Caucasus, estimated to be 50–60 years. Chinese women lived longer on an average than most places, bringing their average up.
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