Estimation of the Life Expectancy of Tenants in the Middle Ages

Marianne Jonker

Mathematical Population Studies, 2009, vol. 16, issue 2, 131-152

Abstract: In England in the Middle Ages, inheritance data were recorded of tenants who owned land from the Crown. Male adult mortality is estimated from these data. A tenant was allowed to sell his land. Only if he still owned land at death, his age at death was observed; so death was right censored by sell of all the land. The censoring times are not observed because sell of land was never recorded. This makes the estimation problem nonstandard. The age at death is left truncated, because a future tenant had to survive his testator to inherit the title “tenant” and the land and to appear in the dataset. Life span distribution and life expectancy are estimated before and during the outbreak of the Black Death, which started in 1348.

Keywords: adult mortality; left-truncation; maximum likelihood estimators; Middle Ages; right-censoring; survival analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.1080/08898480902790387

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